A lot of people get bailed before their day in court. I will say right now that at the time Julian Assange was given bail he was not facing criminal prosecution by the UK legal system, he was the subject of a European Arrest Warrant which is something different. Until the legal challenges to the EAW were done with he was bailed on the understanding that he would do a bunch of things like report to a police station, surrender his passport, attend any obligatory legal proceedings in person etc. It would have been explained to him before he was bailed that a breach of these conditions was in itself a criminal offence. Failure to accept these conditions would mean he would be held in a remand centre.
Very very few people who are bailed run away and fail to appear in court, in part because they know that the consequences are that they will be regarded as a fugitive and subject to penalties when and if they are caught or even if they return voluntarily.
Absconding from bail is a remarkably easy crime to prosecute, the conditions to meet a reasonable expectation of finding the person charged guilty are usually self-evident. There's no forensic evidence needed, no eye-witness testimony, recovery of stolen property etc. Anyone facing such a charge usually pleads guilty because the case is open-and-shut.
About the only way out would be to present evidence of kidnapping or being forced to skip bail by others by threats or duress or maybe diminished responsibility i.e. they didn't understand what they needed to do under the conditions of bail. I can't see any of those conditions applying in Julian Assange's case.
The person facing a manslaughter charge left the country before the case came to trial, absconding while on bail. After he returned voluntarily to the UK he pled guilty to absconding while on bail and received a 6-month sentence for that particular offence, mitigated by his voluntary return to custody, pleading guilty to absconding and apologising for absconding in the first place.
The British judicial system has specified tariffs for sentencing including reduction in sentences for pleading guilty, showing remorse and other factors. I can't really see Julian Assange getting treated as lightly in his case given he was expelled from the Embassy but had to be taken from there by British police since he wouldn't leave voluntarily. I don't expect him to plead guilty to absconding since he's JULIAN ASSANGE! after all and as for showing remorse for absconding well...
The severity of the crime they are originally charged with does not affect whether the offence of absconding while on bail should be prosecuted or not. It's a separate offence that is taken seriously by the British judicial system.
it depends on whether the Crown Prosecution Service can be bothered to prosecute him for skipping bail.
Someone who skipped bail a few months back and fled abroad has returned to the UK voluntarily, saying he panicked and made a mistake and apologised in court for absconding. He got a sentence of six months for the bail offence added to his in-absentia sentence for manslaughter today.
Assange has been "on the run" for seven years after skipping bail and had to be dragged kicking and protesting from his hidey-hole and it's unlikely he will apologise in court for skipping bail. I don't see the Crown Prosecution Service thinking "well, he's not worth the effort of prosecuting for absconding while bailed" in those circumstances.
It's pretty rare for the legal establishment to disregard bail offences as it might encourage others to similarly offend, thinking "I can skip bail and nothing will happen to me."
I saw a comment on a hardware hacking blog a few years ago about a musician who used a repurposed server as his composing workstation. He wrote music for films, TV shows, entertainment and promotional work for a well-paid living.
His workstation/server had four 8-core Xeons so he could composite multiple channels of music in real-time and 512GB of RAM so he could keep several hundred GB of music samples in RAM as he worked. He reckoned the server paid for itself in time saved and delivery-to-customer scheduling with the first two projects. He had used high-end Apple kit before he moved to this solution but nothing out of Cupertino could match what he had built himself.
By the time of Apollo the German scientists were behind the times engineering-wise never mind in the propellants race. The US engineers at Rocketdyne couldn't resist the idea of bigger is better and went for a motor design with a unitary combustion chamber and giant expansion bell, then fought for years to solve the gas flow problems that design decision caused. Finally they had to accept lower efficiency to get it to work well enough which more than cancelled out the expected savings in weight and manufacturing costs.
Building multiple-chamber motors could have improved the performance of the Apollo launchers significantly -- a four-man crew capsule, a larger lander/ascent stage for a three-man exploration team, enough consumables for extended missions on the surface even though an Lunar night, who knows?
The Saturn V's first-stage engines were crude and inefficient due to problems scaling up the engineering of smaller rocket motors, with bodges added to solve difficulties with the flow of oxidiser and fuel into the engine. The Soviet solution was to use multiple smaller injection systems in separate combustion chambers.
By the late 1960s the Isp figure for LOX/RP fuels was about what we can get today, 300s-plus at sea level for well-designed engines like the RD-170 derivatives (the F1's sea-level Isp was 263s by comparison). The big steps made in rocket engineering are design and materials. The structures are lighter but stronger since the CAD tools allow better understanding of where to add mass and where to remove it without lessening strength, rigidity, resistance to vibration, heat dissipation and other factors. The engines are modelled and tested in simulation a long time before any metal is bent or additively-fabricated, the shapes and structures can be more complex thanks to new manufacturing processes, new alloys and composite materials are available etc. etc.
Which part of a rocket structure, the tanks, hull, fairing etc. is expected to resist temperatures much above two or three hundred degrees Celsius? The engines, yes, but they run a lot hotter than the melting point of stainless steels and are actively cooled where necessary.
I can't think of a cost benefit for using stainless steel in an aerospace environment except if Musk plans to build something like the trans-Pacific Tokyo Express, a multi-Mach ballistic passenger transport which would have a hot re-entry as it re-enters thick air from the troposphere. Using a heat-resistant stainless steel would reduce or eliminate the need to replace ablative thermal coatings after every flight.
There's an experimental supersonic aircraft, a precursor to the SR-71, the BAC-188 (now in in the RAF museum at Cosford) which was made from stainless steel to investigate aircraft skin temperature effects at high speeds. It was never intended to be a production aircraft though.
Britain has vastly reduced its dependence on coal-burning to produce electricity by building out a lot of combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) generators which burn gas instead. Over the next couple of decades Germany's coal-fired power plants will be mostly replaced by similar CCGT plants which will continue to dump CO2 into the atmosphere. A quick Google suggests Germany already produces over 10% of its electricity from natural gas (83 TWh in 2018 from one source). Of course it also burns a lot of gas for domestic and industrial heating too since electricity is too expensive to use for home heating in Germany at nearly 30 Eu cents/kWh.
Germany is increasing its consumption of imported natural gas, mostly from Russia. The Nord Stream II pipeline is under construction at the moment, to bypass/supplement the trans-Ukranian pipeline currently feeding Western Europe as well as increasing supply capacity generally by about 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year. It's pretty certain that capacity will find eager customers in various European countries that are nominally pro-renewable but don't want to freeze to death in the dark.
Decades later I saw crappy-quality videotapes of the show on sale in places like SF conventions, labelled as "fact." It was really well done for the time, a docudrama expose of a combined US/Russian plan for elites to escape to the Moon and Mars as Earth's biosphere collapsed. Apparently there's a DVD out, I should maybe try and track down a copy... that's assuming it's not already up on YouTube and labelled "fact"...
The school was built a long time after the plant was in place and operating. There were no zoning regs that stopped anyone building homes, hospitals, school or anything else next to the wire fence because It's Texas. The previous poster told us the free markets will bring all those people back to life because free markets can do everything. Really.
Also many areas of Texas have no zoning laws. The Towns/Counties arent telling people what is and is not allowed. They just let the free market handle it, and it works.
TL:DR -- A free-market fertiliser plant blew up, killing fifteen Americans and injuring 160, destroying and damaging homes and a school sited next to the plant because there were no zoning regulations.
The seven-person Dragon capsule has people packed in like sardines, less usable volume than a people-carrier. Getting three people and two spacewalk suits plus EVA backpacks, pre-breathing apparatus and exercise equipment into the back of a small minivan and expect the crewmen to be able to do anything once they're in there is not a goer.
From the NASA webpages on EVAs from the ISS:
The ISS pre-breathe protocol involves breathing pure oxygen for a total of 2 hours and 20 minutes and includes a short period of high-intensity exercise at the beginning of the pre-breathe procedure.
Dragon crews only get one spacewalk per flight, of course unlike the Shuttle's capabilities -- the last Hubble repair mission (STS-125/SM4) carried out five spacewalks with 11 tonnes of supporting equipment over 12 days. Dragon 2 can carry a total of 6 tonnes including crew, supplies etc. to ISS orbit, much less up to the Hubble orbit of course.
Gemini "EVA" involved both crew members being suited for space all the time in the capsule since the spacewalks involved depressurising the entire crew living quarters. The Hubble had an airlock, jumpsuited support personnel for the jumpsuited spacewalkers who assisted them into their suits and out again permitting multiple two-man multi-hour spacewalks to accomplish several different tasks on each flight which lasted several days.
The Shuttle also had the Canada arm to carry space walkers and parts to the Hubble as well as grapple with the Hubble itself. Dragon has no arm and nowhere and no way to mount an arm or power and control it.
Dragon is optimised to reach the ISS orbit at about 400km, carrying passengers up and down from the space station. The Hubble orbits at about 550km, a lot higher. To reach the Hubble and manoeuvre around it the Dragon would have to carry more fuel and less payload but still have parts, EVA suits, supplies for an extended flight time of over a week, an airlock etc.
The Shuttle had a large dry mass but it also had a large "wet" mass -- it could launch with up to 18 tonnes of manoeuvering fuel as well as 20 tonnes of payload in the payload bay (there were mass tradeoffs though depending on the mission). Dragon is designed down to meet "spam-in-a-can" specifications, a Soyuz replacement with some extra bells and whistles.
It would be better to build and launch a Hubble replacement rather than attempt to keep it running by repair and maintenance flights. Technology has moved on since the 1980s when the Hubble was designed and built. I doubt if there's a budget for an exact replacement now though.
the Hubble got launched, fixed and repaired and updated and serviced because the US had the Space Shuttle to carry a crew, equipment, parts, space walkers, support, the Canada arm, manoeuvring fuel, a toilet and shower up to the Hubble's high orbit. They don't have a Shuttle any more.
The US plans for a return to manned spaceflight involves 1960s-style "spam in a can" up-around-and-down flights to nowhere, with none of the useful luxuries the Shuttle had, especially the ability to support spacewalks.
I just had a look, the version of Corel PhotoPaint I'm running on this box (Win 8.1) has a copyright date of 1998. If I recall I bought it surplus in 2002 or so, it's been installed on a few Windows machines since then without needing to be rewritten or patched.
Selective Availability was a deliberate degradation of the non-military positioning accuracy, "fuzzing" the reported position data. This has been switched off but the most accurate GPS signals are still encrypted and intended only for military and government use, even in the new more accurate GPS satellites being launched.
The Galileo system provides that level of military-grade accuracy (to within a cm or so) to commercial customers, not just the military forces of participating countries and allied forces. It is still encrypted and requires payment and vetting of customers. Galileo's Open Service is accurate to 1 metre, a lot better than GPS' equivalent free service.
It's entirely possible commercial pressures will mean higher-accuracy GPS signals might be made available to civilian users in the future but at the moment only Galileo can provide that sort of service over-the-counter.
The US GPS, Chinese Beidou and Russian GLONASS are all positioning systems intended primarily for military use but which offer a degraded lower-accuracy signal for commercial and private users. The EU's Galileo navigation system offers precision to within a few cms, effectively military-grade accuracy, to paying commercial users as well as open but less-accurate position data similar to the "free" GPS, GLONASS and Beidou systems.
Brushing the coal to make "clean coal" sounds like a homeopathic idea.
Otto Frisch, the nuclear scientist wrote a parody scientific paper back in 1955 set in the distant future when nuclear fuels had become scarce, entitled "On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations". It suggested that coal be machined into similar-sized spheres for optimum packing within the furnace among other things. Its energy density was derisory of course compared to safe clean uranium. The gaseous emissions would be dealt with by captive balloons of some sort since it was unthinkable to allow the toxic wastes from the coal-burning furnace to enter the atmosphere we breathed.
Some other countries also use electricity for most of their home heating and industrial requirements when electricity is cheap and abundant. Iceland, for example and Norway -- it's said that Norwegians don't know a light switch works in both directions. Norway relies on having a lot of hydro power on tap, a small population and a significant land area with the right geography to harvest hydro power from.
France has some hydro power from the Alps but only a few GW at best depending on the season. They have a large population but their non-carbon nuclear power is cheaper for heating than importing and burning lots of fossil gas like other nearby countries do. Sometimes they buy in surplus electricity from their neighbours such as Spain, Britain and Germany but usually they're net exporters to places like Switzerland and Italy.
French electricity demand always exceeds the available nuclear power supply even in the low-demand summertime when they schedule shutdowns for inspections, maintenance and refuelling. France is unusual in that it uses electricity to provide a lot of home and industrial heating since it's cheap and readily available. Other "green" countries like Germany, Denmark etc. burn gas to supply this heating requirement and the resulting CO2 gets dumped into the atmosphere.
By the time they are being closed in 2035 (assuming the government don't change their mind again) the M910 reactors in question will have been in operation for about 55-60 years. They could probably get revamped (replacing most of the ancillary plant, turbine-generator sets etc.) and run for another twenty years or so but that would cost a chunk of money. The later reactors built in the early 1980s are more powerful than the first set (five-loop steam generators rather than three-loop in the earlier plants) and they're likely to continue in use for a bit longer, maybe into the 2050s or even further, especially if the supplies of cheap gas (the actual planned energy replacement for these reactors) start running out.
Polywell has some kickass Powerpoint presentations and gasp! computer simulations too! Graphs even! Wow!
Polywell is a low-cost project so it can run in parallel with ITER which is based on fifty years of pumped-down vacuum in tokamaks and achieving sustained (tens of seconds) controllable plasma and fusion energies in the 0.1Q region. The slideshow you pointed to me finally provided me with some information I'd been looking for about Polywell, its plasma sustainability is in the 100 microsecond region based on twenty years of hardware development. God knows what their Q figure or equivalent is though. Really nice graphics work on the slides though.
Initial fusion research using magnetic mirror containment and "pinch" was promising until instability appeared and the mirrors started to leak at higher temperatures and densities, hence the move to tokamaks and stellarators (which seem to be making a comeback recently). Scaling up ITER might not work. That's what makes it fun, Nobel Prizes all around!
The scientific community has a lot more understanding of plasma physics and engineering, modelling and computation, control systems, instrumentation etc. today and ITER is being designed on that basis. It's still new ground and there could be problems previously unforeseen. We'll find out.
The core funding, materials sourcing and engineering of ITER is Europe-based hence the decision to place it in Cadarache, an established nuclear fission research hub (not far from Nice on the Mediterranean coast) which already has a lot of useful engineering facilities and skilled workforce present. Locating ITER in Japan and earthquake-proofing the facilities would have involved much more cost as well as exascerbating the movement of personnel. As a contributor nation Japan provides only 9% of the material and staffing inputs to the project meaning the EU which provides 45% would have to ship large components, researchers, engineers etc. half-way around the world back and forth. Not a goer but since the US had a hate on for France after the Iraq invasion the actual choice of site was delayed while the US worked its way through its temper tantrum.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people get bailed before their day in court. I will say right now that at the time Julian Assange was given bail he was not facing criminal prosecution by the UK legal system, he was the subject of a European Arrest Warrant which is something different. Until the legal challenges to the EAW were done with he was bailed on the understanding that he would do a bunch of things like report to a police station, surrender his passport, attend any obligatory legal proceedings in person etc. It would have been explained to him before he was bailed that a breach of these conditions was in itself a criminal offence. Failure to accept these conditions would mean he would be held in a remand centre.
Very very few people who are bailed run away and fail to appear in court, in part because they know that the consequences are that they will be regarded as a fugitive and subject to penalties when and if they are caught or even if they return voluntarily.
Absconding from bail is a remarkably easy crime to prosecute, the conditions to meet a reasonable expectation of finding the person charged guilty are usually self-evident. There's no forensic evidence needed, no eye-witness testimony, recovery of stolen property etc. Anyone facing such a charge usually pleads guilty because the case is open-and-shut.
About the only way out would be to present evidence of kidnapping or being forced to skip bail by others by threats or duress or maybe diminished responsibility i.e. they didn't understand what they needed to do under the conditions of bail. I can't see any of those conditions applying in Julian Assange's case.
The person facing a manslaughter charge left the country before the case came to trial, absconding while on bail. After he returned voluntarily to the UK he pled guilty to absconding while on bail and received a 6-month sentence for that particular offence, mitigated by his voluntary return to custody, pleading guilty to absconding and apologising for absconding in the first place.
The British judicial system has specified tariffs for sentencing including reduction in sentences for pleading guilty, showing remorse and other factors. I can't really see Julian Assange getting treated as lightly in his case given he was expelled from the Embassy but had to be taken from there by British police since he wouldn't leave voluntarily. I don't expect him to plead guilty to absconding since he's JULIAN ASSANGE! after all and as for showing remorse for absconding well...
The severity of the crime they are originally charged with does not affect whether the offence of absconding while on bail should be prosecuted or not. It's a separate offence that is taken seriously by the British judicial system.
it depends on whether the Crown Prosecution Service can be bothered to prosecute him for skipping bail.
Someone who skipped bail a few months back and fled abroad has returned to the UK voluntarily, saying he panicked and made a mistake and apologised in court for absconding. He got a sentence of six months for the bail offence added to his in-absentia sentence for manslaughter today.
Assange has been "on the run" for seven years after skipping bail and had to be dragged kicking and protesting from his hidey-hole and it's unlikely he will apologise in court for skipping bail. I don't see the Crown Prosecution Service thinking "well, he's not worth the effort of prosecuting for absconding while bailed" in those circumstances.
It's pretty rare for the legal establishment to disregard bail offences as it might encourage others to similarly offend, thinking "I can skip bail and nothing will happen to me."
I saw a comment on a hardware hacking blog a few years ago about a musician who used a repurposed server as his composing workstation. He wrote music for films, TV shows, entertainment and promotional work for a well-paid living.
His workstation/server had four 8-core Xeons so he could composite multiple channels of music in real-time and 512GB of RAM so he could keep several hundred GB of music samples in RAM as he worked. He reckoned the server paid for itself in time saved and delivery-to-customer scheduling with the first two projects. He had used high-end Apple kit before he moved to this solution but nothing out of Cupertino could match what he had built himself.
By the time of Apollo the German scientists were behind the times engineering-wise never mind in the propellants race. The US engineers at Rocketdyne couldn't resist the idea of bigger is better and went for a motor design with a unitary combustion chamber and giant expansion bell, then fought for years to solve the gas flow problems that design decision caused. Finally they had to accept lower efficiency to get it to work well enough which more than cancelled out the expected savings in weight and manufacturing costs.
Building multiple-chamber motors could have improved the performance of the Apollo launchers significantly -- a four-man crew capsule, a larger lander/ascent stage for a three-man exploration team, enough consumables for extended missions on the surface even though an Lunar night, who knows?
The Saturn V's first-stage engines were crude and inefficient due to problems scaling up the engineering of smaller rocket motors, with bodges added to solve difficulties with the flow of oxidiser and fuel into the engine. The Soviet solution was to use multiple smaller injection systems in separate combustion chambers.
By the late 1960s the Isp figure for LOX/RP fuels was about what we can get today, 300s-plus at sea level for well-designed engines like the RD-170 derivatives (the F1's sea-level Isp was 263s by comparison). The big steps made in rocket engineering are design and materials. The structures are lighter but stronger since the CAD tools allow better understanding of where to add mass and where to remove it without lessening strength, rigidity, resistance to vibration, heat dissipation and other factors. The engines are modelled and tested in simulation a long time before any metal is bent or additively-fabricated, the shapes and structures can be more complex thanks to new manufacturing processes, new alloys and composite materials are available etc. etc.
Which part of a rocket structure, the tanks, hull, fairing etc. is expected to resist temperatures much above two or three hundred degrees Celsius? The engines, yes, but they run a lot hotter than the melting point of stainless steels and are actively cooled where necessary.
I can't think of a cost benefit for using stainless steel in an aerospace environment except if Musk plans to build something like the trans-Pacific Tokyo Express, a multi-Mach ballistic passenger transport which would have a hot re-entry as it re-enters thick air from the troposphere. Using a heat-resistant stainless steel would reduce or eliminate the need to replace ablative thermal coatings after every flight.
There's an experimental supersonic aircraft, a precursor to the SR-71, the BAC-188 (now in in the RAF museum at Cosford) which was made from stainless steel to investigate aircraft skin temperature effects at high speeds. It was never intended to be a production aircraft though.
Britain has vastly reduced its dependence on coal-burning to produce electricity by building out a lot of combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) generators which burn gas instead. Over the next couple of decades Germany's coal-fired power plants will be mostly replaced by similar CCGT plants which will continue to dump CO2 into the atmosphere. A quick Google suggests Germany already produces over 10% of its electricity from natural gas (83 TWh in 2018 from one source). Of course it also burns a lot of gas for domestic and industrial heating too since electricity is too expensive to use for home heating in Germany at nearly 30 Eu cents/kWh.
Germany is increasing its consumption of imported natural gas, mostly from Russia. The Nord Stream II pipeline is under construction at the moment, to bypass/supplement the trans-Ukranian pipeline currently feeding Western Europe as well as increasing supply capacity generally by about 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year. It's pretty certain that capacity will find eager customers in various European countries that are nominally pro-renewable but don't want to freeze to death in the dark.
I'm old enough to remember the Alien Autopsy "documentary" on TV 25 years ago
Heh. I remember seeing "Alternative 3" when it was broadcast on TV and that was over forty years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Decades later I saw crappy-quality videotapes of the show on sale in places like SF conventions, labelled as "fact." It was really well done for the time, a docudrama expose of a combined US/Russian plan for elites to escape to the Moon and Mars as Earth's biosphere collapsed. Apparently there's a DVD out, I should maybe try and track down a copy... that's assuming it's not already up on YouTube and labelled "fact"...
The school was built a long time after the plant was in place and operating. There were no zoning regs that stopped anyone building homes, hospitals, school or anything else next to the wire fence because It's Texas. The previous poster told us the free markets will bring all those people back to life because free markets can do everything. Really.
Also many areas of Texas have no zoning laws. The Towns/Counties arent telling people what is and is not allowed. They just let the free market handle it, and it works.
Ah, you mean no-zoning like in West, Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
TL:DR -- A free-market fertiliser plant blew up, killing fifteen Americans and injuring 160, destroying and damaging homes and a school sited next to the plant because there were no zoning regulations.
The seven-person Dragon capsule has people packed in like sardines, less usable volume than a people-carrier. Getting three people and two spacewalk suits plus EVA backpacks, pre-breathing apparatus and exercise equipment into the back of a small minivan and expect the crewmen to be able to do anything once they're in there is not a goer.
From the NASA webpages on EVAs from the ISS:
The ISS pre-breathe protocol involves breathing pure oxygen for a total of 2 hours and 20 minutes and includes a short period of high-intensity exercise at the beginning of the pre-breathe procedure.
Dragon crews only get one spacewalk per flight, of course unlike the Shuttle's capabilities -- the last Hubble repair mission (STS-125/SM4) carried out five spacewalks with 11 tonnes of supporting equipment over 12 days. Dragon 2 can carry a total of 6 tonnes including crew, supplies etc. to ISS orbit, much less up to the Hubble orbit of course.
Gemini "EVA" involved both crew members being suited for space all the time in the capsule since the spacewalks involved depressurising the entire crew living quarters. The Hubble had an airlock, jumpsuited support personnel for the jumpsuited spacewalkers who assisted them into their suits and out again permitting multiple two-man multi-hour spacewalks to accomplish several different tasks on each flight which lasted several days.
The Shuttle also had the Canada arm to carry space walkers and parts to the Hubble as well as grapple with the Hubble itself. Dragon has no arm and nowhere and no way to mount an arm or power and control it.
Dragon is optimised to reach the ISS orbit at about 400km, carrying passengers up and down from the space station. The Hubble orbits at about 550km, a lot higher. To reach the Hubble and manoeuvre around it the Dragon would have to carry more fuel and less payload but still have parts, EVA suits, supplies for an extended flight time of over a week, an airlock etc.
The Shuttle had a large dry mass but it also had a large "wet" mass -- it could launch with up to 18 tonnes of manoeuvering fuel as well as 20 tonnes of payload in the payload bay (there were mass tradeoffs though depending on the mission). Dragon is designed down to meet "spam-in-a-can" specifications, a Soyuz replacement with some extra bells and whistles.
It would be better to build and launch a Hubble replacement rather than attempt to keep it running by repair and maintenance flights. Technology has moved on since the 1980s when the Hubble was designed and built. I doubt if there's a budget for an exact replacement now though.
the Hubble got launched, fixed and repaired and updated and serviced because the US had the Space Shuttle to carry a crew, equipment, parts, space walkers, support, the Canada arm, manoeuvring fuel, a toilet and shower up to the Hubble's high orbit. They don't have a Shuttle any more.
The US plans for a return to manned spaceflight involves 1960s-style "spam in a can" up-around-and-down flights to nowhere, with none of the useful luxuries the Shuttle had, especially the ability to support spacewalks.
"Datagram for Mongo!"
I just had a look, the version of Corel PhotoPaint I'm running on this box (Win 8.1) has a copyright date of 1998. If I recall I bought it surplus in 2002 or so, it's been installed on a few Windows machines since then without needing to be rewritten or patched.
Selective Availability was a deliberate degradation of the non-military positioning accuracy, "fuzzing" the reported position data. This has been switched off but the most accurate GPS signals are still encrypted and intended only for military and government use, even in the new more accurate GPS satellites being launched.
The Galileo system provides that level of military-grade accuracy (to within a cm or so) to commercial customers, not just the military forces of participating countries and allied forces. It is still encrypted and requires payment and vetting of customers. Galileo's Open Service is accurate to 1 metre, a lot better than GPS' equivalent free service.
It's entirely possible commercial pressures will mean higher-accuracy GPS signals might be made available to civilian users in the future but at the moment only Galileo can provide that sort of service over-the-counter.
The US GPS, Chinese Beidou and Russian GLONASS are all positioning systems intended primarily for military use but which offer a degraded lower-accuracy signal for commercial and private users. The EU's Galileo navigation system offers precision to within a few cms, effectively military-grade accuracy, to paying commercial users as well as open but less-accurate position data similar to the "free" GPS, GLONASS and Beidou systems.
Brushing the coal to make "clean coal" sounds like a homeopathic idea.
Otto Frisch, the nuclear scientist wrote a parody scientific paper back in 1955 set in the distant future when nuclear fuels had become scarce, entitled "On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations". It suggested that coal be machined into similar-sized spheres for optimum packing within the furnace among other things. Its energy density was derisory of course compared to safe clean uranium. The gaseous emissions would be dealt with by captive balloons of some sort since it was unthinkable to allow the toxic wastes from the coal-burning furnace to enter the atmosphere we breathed.
https://www.mpoweruk.com/coal....
Some other countries also use electricity for most of their home heating and industrial requirements when electricity is cheap and abundant. Iceland, for example and Norway -- it's said that Norwegians don't know a light switch works in both directions. Norway relies on having a lot of hydro power on tap, a small population and a significant land area with the right geography to harvest hydro power from.
France has some hydro power from the Alps but only a few GW at best depending on the season. They have a large population but their non-carbon nuclear power is cheaper for heating than importing and burning lots of fossil gas like other nearby countries do. Sometimes they buy in surplus electricity from their neighbours such as Spain, Britain and Germany but usually they're net exporters to places like Switzerland and Italy.
French electricity demand always exceeds the available nuclear power supply even in the low-demand summertime when they schedule shutdowns for inspections, maintenance and refuelling. France is unusual in that it uses electricity to provide a lot of home and industrial heating since it's cheap and readily available. Other "green" countries like Germany, Denmark etc. burn gas to supply this heating requirement and the resulting CO2 gets dumped into the atmosphere.
By the time they are being closed in 2035 (assuming the government don't change their mind again) the M910 reactors in question will have been in operation for about 55-60 years. They could probably get revamped (replacing most of the ancillary plant, turbine-generator sets etc.) and run for another twenty years or so but that would cost a chunk of money. The later reactors built in the early 1980s are more powerful than the first set (five-loop steam generators rather than three-loop in the earlier plants) and they're likely to continue in use for a bit longer, maybe into the 2050s or even further, especially if the supplies of cheap gas (the actual planned energy replacement for these reactors) start running out.
Polywell has some kickass Powerpoint presentations and gasp! computer simulations too! Graphs even! Wow!
Polywell is a low-cost project so it can run in parallel with ITER which is based on fifty years of pumped-down vacuum in tokamaks and achieving sustained (tens of seconds) controllable plasma and fusion energies in the 0.1Q region. The slideshow you pointed to me finally provided me with some information I'd been looking for about Polywell, its plasma sustainability is in the 100 microsecond region based on twenty years of hardware development. God knows what their Q figure or equivalent is though. Really nice graphics work on the slides though.
Initial fusion research using magnetic mirror containment and "pinch" was promising until instability appeared and the mirrors started to leak at higher temperatures and densities, hence the move to tokamaks and stellarators (which seem to be making a comeback recently). Scaling up ITER might not work. That's what makes it fun, Nobel Prizes all around!
The scientific community has a lot more understanding of plasma physics and engineering, modelling and computation, control systems, instrumentation etc. today and ITER is being designed on that basis. It's still new ground and there could be problems previously unforeseen. We'll find out.
The core funding, materials sourcing and engineering of ITER is Europe-based hence the decision to place it in Cadarache, an established nuclear fission research hub (not far from Nice on the Mediterranean coast) which already has a lot of useful engineering facilities and skilled workforce present. Locating ITER in Japan and earthquake-proofing the facilities would have involved much more cost as well as exascerbating the movement of personnel. As a contributor nation Japan provides only 9% of the material and staffing inputs to the project meaning the EU which provides 45% would have to ship large components, researchers, engineers etc. half-way around the world back and forth. Not a goer but since the US had a hate on for France after the Iraq invasion the actual choice of site was delayed while the US worked its way through its temper tantrum.