In terms of actual track record - the Shuttle failed to deliver on many of its promises. Despite being a reusable vehicle, I believe it proved to be actually more expensive to operate than one-time-use launch vehicles. Part of that was due to conflicting requirements from multiple entities - the military wanted certain capabilities that greatly increased cost.
Meanwhile, the one-time use + capsule approach worked VERY well while it was in use, and has continued to work very well for Russia.
Go with what works, not what doesn't.
Modernizing a proven design is far less risky than a revolutionary one, and in many cases, basing your design on a proven one makes certification paperwork and testing MUCH easier. Certification and paperwork testing is a VERY large part of a program like this.
I believe, though, that the article is partially wrong. It says that Constellation was cancelled but Lockheed/NASA had plans for more than what Constellation required and hence continued on. I'm fairly certain this is wrong - what I recall from the days Constellation was in trouble (at that point good friends of mine were working on Orion) is that Constellation had very ambitious scope and goals for the Orion capsule, but after Orion went away there were still needs that Orion was well suited to fulfill, and hence it was able to continue in a significantly de-scoped form.
In space, the main problem (unless your spacecraft is nuclear-powered) are high energy cosmic rays.
In Japan, the issue is with radionuclide contamination.
Also, NASA's looking for a way to keep external radiation out - in Japan they're trying to contain radioactive substances within a vessel that contains superheated water that is pressurizing it, water which is unfortunately radioactive (resulting in the steam being radioactive if they vent it)
That's why a bunch of people think this merger happened. Supposedly it's about a 5-year process to get a new cell site approved by the FCC. (e.g. it's not about money, it's about paperwork delay).
The problem is: T-Mobile's 3G sites are all in the 1700 MHz band. No AT&T handset supports UMTS1700 to my knowledge, so AT&T phones won't be able to use the new tower assets for 3G. A cell site approval from the FCC is not based just on siting - it's licensed for a specific frequency and power level. So the T-Mo tower assets can't just be switched over to a different band.
There is a *slight* possibility it may be easier for AT&T to get an STA to change a tower to a new band than to build a new site though.
As to the negative effect this will have on equipment manufacturers (handset and network infrastructure) - Anyone claiming this will have a significant negative impact on those people is forgetting that there are more countries on this planet than the United States.
In terms of handsets - AT&T has already been in a situation of using bands not supported by any other carrier anywhere else in the world. Any phones for them had to be specially customized for them. Now, quad-band GSM has been common for a long time, but I have yet to see a UMTS handset that supported both the world frequencies and all of the US frequencies. T-Mobile was slightly fortunate in that unlike UMTS1900/UMTS850, some other countries did use UMTS1700. As a result, manufacturers could target more markets with a handset that supported UMTS1700/2100 than one that supported UMTS2100+the AT&T bands.
For network equipment providers - nothing changes. Previously you had equipment for AT&T and equipment for the rest of the world, this doesn't change. AT&T is still at a disadvantage of lacking the economies of scale the rest of the world can take advantage of.
So, why is this so bad? Please state exactly why the current situation (as long as it does not degrade) is so bad, assuming that it does not degrade significantly.
Note: The long-term death toll including induced cancer cases from the worst nuclear incident (not accident, but dangerous experiment gone wrong - read up on the timeline leading up to the incident) in history is estimated to be approximately 4000 people.
The quake and tsunami that caused this situation killed more people than that in a matter of HOURS - the current confirmed death toll is 6,911, nearly all of that within the first few hours after the quake.
So the behavior of the plant has been quite impressive considering the extreme situation it has been put in and the fact that it is an outdated design - Unit I was originally scheduled to get decommissioned this month but had its service life extended.
The situation isn't perfect - there are lessons to be learned: Nearly all reactor safety engineering has to date been based on a single reactor. There needs to be more planning and analysis to handle multiunit facilities like this one. There needs to be more focus on critical reactor support facilities, not just the reactor/containment building itself - The big problem here was the placement of the backup generators in a tsunami-prone location We need to stop fighting the construction of modern plants that have significantly improved safety designs. This situation would have been a non-issue with an ESBWR due to its significantly reduced (maybe even eliminated) dependency on external power for decay heat removal. Fighting new plants means old plants like this one are kept in service, and that IS a threat.
Unit I was originally scheduled to be decommissioned this month, but it had its service life extended 10 years.
The anti-nuclear lobby has kind of shot themselves in the foot. By fighting new plants tooth and nail, they have caused outdated plants to remain in service longer than planned. Even if you overhaul the system completely, design improvements in new reactors can't be added.
As to catastrophic modes of failure... The problem is we don't have any better viable options.
Coal - Many would consider this a catastrophic mode of operation. Coal is notorious for spewing carcinogens into the air. Between living 5 miles from a first-gen nuke plant and a coal plant - I'll take the nuke plant. With the nuke plant there's a tiny chance I might get exposed to something toxic. With the coal plant it's guaranteed. Gas - Similarly, "catastrophic mode of operation" - Gas burns clean, but the methods we use to obtain it are anything but. Five or so years of hydrofracturing operations as part of gas drilling have sickened and injured far more people than the entire history of nuclear in the United States. Probably more than the entire history of nuclear excluding Chernobyl. (Being a dangerous experiment gone wrong and not really an acccident, I consider Chernobyl independently from other nuclear incidents.) Wind/Solar - Not suitable for baseload generation, unpredictable and inconsistent, requires building MORE coal or gas (more likely gas since gas plants can change output faster) to fill in the holes. We need to invest more in these, but they are not suitable as our only baseload electrical source until we make vast improvements in energy storage. Hydro - Catastrophic failure mode present, has to date killed FAR more people than nuclear (even including Chernobyl), we're also basically tapped out as far as places to put new hydro plants Nuclear (By building new plants with improved safety - the ESBWR design has passive safety measures that would have resulted in the current situation being a non-issue) is our most viable option. However, the current approach of extending the service life of old plants is NOT a safe approach.
Much of the article seemed reasonable, but I agree with you - the author lost a LOT of credibility when downplaying Chernobyl that significantly.
I do believe that it is valid to point out, regarding Chernobyl, that most of the estimates of the total number of long-term deaths it caused put things around 4000 or so. This is less than even the initial estimates of immediate short-term life loss from the quake and tsunami.
To his credit, the radiation from a pack of cigarettes isn't the problem, it's the chemical toxins.
That said - It's clear that some people at Fukushima have had enough exposure for longterm effects at this point. Just how much those affects are and if they are worse than chainsmoking - unknown.
If it makes that big of a difference in iOS, that just means iOS is broken.
Non-tablet apps run just fine without tweaks in nearly all situations on Android tablets. I haven't used a single tablet-optimized app on my Huawei S7 - they just properly handled the lcd.density variable and adjusted their rendering to take into account the difference.
Another way you could interpret it is, "The number of Android applications that require specific tablet optimizations jumped from 16 to 37, while iOS is so broken that 65,000+ apps had to be tweaked to run on the iPad properly"
This is one of the dumbest arguments against Android I have ever seen. Normal Android apps run fine on a tablet without optimizations.
The number of "tablet-optimized" iOS apps says to me two things: 1) A bunch of people are slapping "Tablet-optimized" onto their apps without doing anything significant for marketing purposes 2) There are fundamental architectural shortcomings of iOS that make it more difficult for apps to provide a good experience on a tablet without optimization.
I know that in the case of Android, some of the apps I have used took advantage of the disparity in screen size (mainly because Android has an LCD density parameter that apps can base their rendering off of), despite not being "tablet optimized". (Parallel Kingdom is one such example - you see MUCH more of the map on tablet devices, simply due to different LCD density settings.)
Part of it is that the iPad 1 was the first tablet to come out with a successful formula. Since then, some manufacturers have been intelligent enough to implement the same successful formula.
The short summary of the secret: Scaling up an OS designed for touchscreen phones (iOS, Android) to tablet size (the approach first used by iPad 1 and used by other companies since then) works, scaling down a desktop OS (Windows) to a tablet (the usual approach prior to iPad 1) doesn't.
Microsoft still hasn't learned - they're still trying to stick Windows 7 into tablets. FAIL.
Edge flipping is something I consider to be a MAJOR boost to my productivity, compared to having to minimize/maximize windows to manage my screen real estate.
This was actually the #1 reason for me leaving GNOME - not only was it removed as an option, they seem to have made it a crusade to prevent it from even being added as a third-party addon. There was a program called Brightside that added edge-flipping to GNOME, but eventually the APIs it used were broken in such a manner that the Brightside maintainer gave up. The day Brightside finally stopped working is when I finally made the switch to KDE.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but the "total levelized system cost" is lower than: Half of the natural gas fired technologies - so far the natural gas industry in the US has made far more people sick in just a few years of hydrofracking than the entire history of nuclear in this country Lower than Advanced Coal with CCS, only slightly higher than other coal variants - We're running out of coal, and at this point are blowing up entire mountains to get it Way lower than solar or wind On par with hydro - but our hydro resources are tapped out, there is little to no room to build any more
You are incorrect - Chernobyl was, indeed, fundamentally unsafe by design (nothing to do with age here), partially because it was a derivative of a reactor design whose primary purpose was weapons material generation, not safe power generation.
1) Positive void coefficient due to a graphite moderator (unlike nearly all non-Soviet power reactors where coolant = moderator) 2) No containment measures whatsoever (all US reactors have extremely strong containment buildings, such that even in the case of a full core meltdown, the core should not breach containment.) 3) They were running a dangerous experiment - you are correct there. However, the safety measures didn't fail due to bad maintenance, they failed because they were disabled (part of the "dangerous" component of the experiment).
We have had a few incidents of partial meltdowns (Three Mile Island, and it is looking like Fukushima suffered a partial meltdown) in history, none of which resulted in any core material breaching containment. We have never had a reactor reach a state of full-core meltdown. I do not believe we have ever had a power generation reactor breach containment in history (see 2) above - no containment was breached because there was none to breach in the first place.)
"My main hope here is, that scientists in near future will find a better way to handle all or at least the most dangerous of those substances. Maybe if fusion energy would be available, we could bash the stuff with some extra accelerated neurons to make something harmless out of it. Maybe even something useful. (I know that this is most likely nonsense from a scientific view. Just meant as a kind of abstract picture)"
We already have one technique - it's called reprocessing. Unfortunately, that word is a very dirty one (for archaic reasons - the first reprocessing method that was widely used happened to be good for producing weapons materials.) in the United States. It's why most other countries don't have the waste handling problem we do.
There were also reactor designs that were being researched (such as the IFR) that would produce far less long-lived waste and, if I recall correctly, could even "burn" the waste from current reactors. Killed by uneducated politicians for somehow being a "proliferation risk" - yet reactor designs which are far more suitable to making weapons materials (including fundamentally unsafe RBMKs which were designed primarily for making weapons materials and then repurposed to power generation) continue to be used.
And as to bombarding waste with neutrons from fusion - I recall seeing some articles on this. Who knows, for a long time it may be the only form of fusion energy we'll see. (Fusion for neutron generation is already possible - so combining these techniques with a subcritical fission reactor might work even when we can't get pure fusion viable for power generation.)
Neither of which can provide consistent baseload power. Both of which are unavailable in many regions (either not enough wind, or not enough solar flux)
Nope. If you read the articles in more detail, what happened is the unit failed EMI testing. The end reaction to the failure indicates the hole probably occurred somewhere around 2.4 GHz - however at power levels WELL above what any consumer wifi device is capable of producing (But below that of the standard).
But the FAA is VERY conservative, so a radiated susceptibility hole in the band for a device = kill all emitters in that band, even weak ones, if that device is in use.
The point is - removing spectrum from them is a bad idea.
Basically - in emergencies, the ham bands already DO get used for emergency purposes. It's on a volunteer basis, but it's almost unheard of for non-emergency hams to fail to vacate a frequency in favor of emergency users.
If you take 70cm away from hams, the end result will likely be: You gain the band for emergency use (wait, you already effectively had it!) You lose a lot of frustrated hams - so not only do you effectively lose the other ham bands, you lose a bunch of trained radio operators with emergency experience (or at least emergency training)
It's pretty clear that there are some massive egos/control-freaks within those running the GNOME project.
As far as user interfaces go, it is Havoc Pennington's way or the highway. Havoc has this crazy "usability comes from crippling" approach that dumbs down GNOME for entry-level users but makes it wholly unusable for power users.
Whereas KDE keeps "entry level" defaults and makes some of the niche/advanced configuration options (such as edge flipping) harder to find, GNOME's approach is to outright remove the feature. There are only so many features you can remove before your approach becomes unusable for many.
That's why I used to be a staunch GNOME supporter and fairly anti-KDE (I'm still not a fan of how they handled the Qt/GPL license incompatibilities, the issue didn't get resolved until Qt was effectively forced to change their license. The KDE developers had a consistent attitude that there was no problem and refused to take any approach to address), but have now pretty much changed over entirely to KDE. Around the same time the KDE license incompatibility issue was resolved is when Havoc began his reign of "cripple it in the name of usability" terror. Not only did the GNOME team remove edge flipping, they made it as difficult as possible to add it in after the fact (Brightside effectively broke after every GNOME release, and eventually GNOME broke the interfaces Brightside used to the point where the Brightside maintainer gave up.) It's always been there in KDE.
Yes, the KDE team has gotten a bad rep from KDE 4.0 getting shipped too early. I don't think there was any graceful way to do things here - there always comes a time when a project has to do a major rearchitecture, and sometimes that can't be done without some user pain. Later KDE4 releases are excellent. The key here is - KDE went through some pain in order to greatly improve the flexibility of the platform and leave them room to grow. GNOME didn't - in the short term that was good for GNOME, but in the long term that inflexibility is going to hurt.
Actually if you look through details, it sounds like an EMI hole below that which is specified by the relevant standard was within the 2.4 GHz band.
This hole was nowhere near deep enough for a WiFi device to actually exceed the threshold, but the FAA is VERY conservative when it comes to civilian airliners - Any hole in that band = eliminate all transmitters in that band just to be sure.
Yup. This is because ILS is an old and very finicky interference-sensitive system (It basically relies on determining where within an RF "pencil beam" coming from the end of the runway you are). The concern is that leakage from just the clocks in an active device could throw off the ILS system's accuracy.
Once you're airborne, ILS doesn't matter, and the remaining navigational systems are far less interference-prone.
Yeah, but this isn't a navigation system itself, it's a display unit. I agree that nav systems such as VOR/ILS, TACAN, etc. are very interference-susceptible, which is the reason for "all electronic devices off during takeoff/landing" - but that's not actually the case here.
Carriers install instant messengers on their phones that use SMS as a transport and not IP. (This practice is getting less frequent as time goes by, but a LOT of mobile IM clients do this!). They do NOT detect "SMS-like" IP data and bill it as SMS.
Another reason why stock ROMs from carriers suck.
You're probably in fairly good shape with Android or iOS, as I don't think any IM apps exist for Android that use SMS as the transport instead of IP. However, feature phones, fakesmartphones (you know, those touchscreen phones NOT running one of the major platforms), and some of the older mobile platforms (WM5/WM6) are at risk for the "old and evil" IM apps.
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In terms of actual track record - the Shuttle failed to deliver on many of its promises. Despite being a reusable vehicle, I believe it proved to be actually more expensive to operate than one-time-use launch vehicles. Part of that was due to conflicting requirements from multiple entities - the military wanted certain capabilities that greatly increased cost.
Meanwhile, the one-time use + capsule approach worked VERY well while it was in use, and has continued to work very well for Russia.
Go with what works, not what doesn't.
Modernizing a proven design is far less risky than a revolutionary one, and in many cases, basing your design on a proven one makes certification paperwork and testing MUCH easier. Certification and paperwork testing is a VERY large part of a program like this.
I believe, though, that the article is partially wrong. It says that Constellation was cancelled but Lockheed/NASA had plans for more than what Constellation required and hence continued on. I'm fairly certain this is wrong - what I recall from the days Constellation was in trouble (at that point good friends of mine were working on Orion) is that Constellation had very ambitious scope and goals for the Orion capsule, but after Orion went away there were still needs that Orion was well suited to fulfill, and hence it was able to continue in a significantly de-scoped form.
Nope. Completely different type of radiation.
In space, the main problem (unless your spacecraft is nuclear-powered) are high energy cosmic rays.
In Japan, the issue is with radionuclide contamination.
Also, NASA's looking for a way to keep external radiation out - in Japan they're trying to contain radioactive substances within a vessel that contains superheated water that is pressurizing it, water which is unfortunately radioactive (resulting in the steam being radioactive if they vent it)
That's why a bunch of people think this merger happened. Supposedly it's about a 5-year process to get a new cell site approved by the FCC. (e.g. it's not about money, it's about paperwork delay).
The problem is: T-Mobile's 3G sites are all in the 1700 MHz band. No AT&T handset supports UMTS1700 to my knowledge, so AT&T phones won't be able to use the new tower assets for 3G. A cell site approval from the FCC is not based just on siting - it's licensed for a specific frequency and power level. So the T-Mo tower assets can't just be switched over to a different band.
There is a *slight* possibility it may be easier for AT&T to get an STA to change a tower to a new band than to build a new site though.
As to the negative effect this will have on equipment manufacturers (handset and network infrastructure) - Anyone claiming this will have a significant negative impact on those people is forgetting that there are more countries on this planet than the United States.
In terms of handsets - AT&T has already been in a situation of using bands not supported by any other carrier anywhere else in the world. Any phones for them had to be specially customized for them. Now, quad-band GSM has been common for a long time, but I have yet to see a UMTS handset that supported both the world frequencies and all of the US frequencies. T-Mobile was slightly fortunate in that unlike UMTS1900/UMTS850, some other countries did use UMTS1700. As a result, manufacturers could target more markets with a handset that supported UMTS1700/2100 than one that supported UMTS2100+the AT&T bands.
For network equipment providers - nothing changes. Previously you had equipment for AT&T and equipment for the rest of the world, this doesn't change. AT&T is still at a disadvantage of lacking the economies of scale the rest of the world can take advantage of.
So, why is this so bad? Please state exactly why the current situation (as long as it does not degrade) is so bad, assuming that it does not degrade significantly.
Note: The long-term death toll including induced cancer cases from the worst nuclear incident (not accident, but dangerous experiment gone wrong - read up on the timeline leading up to the incident) in history is estimated to be approximately 4000 people.
The quake and tsunami that caused this situation killed more people than that in a matter of HOURS - the current confirmed death toll is 6,911, nearly all of that within the first few hours after the quake.
So the behavior of the plant has been quite impressive considering the extreme situation it has been put in and the fact that it is an outdated design - Unit I was originally scheduled to get decommissioned this month but had its service life extended.
The situation isn't perfect - there are lessons to be learned:
Nearly all reactor safety engineering has to date been based on a single reactor. There needs to be more planning and analysis to handle multiunit facilities like this one.
There needs to be more focus on critical reactor support facilities, not just the reactor/containment building itself - The big problem here was the placement of the backup generators in a tsunami-prone location
We need to stop fighting the construction of modern plants that have significantly improved safety designs. This situation would have been a non-issue with an ESBWR due to its significantly reduced (maybe even eliminated) dependency on external power for decay heat removal. Fighting new plants means old plants like this one are kept in service, and that IS a threat.
Unit I was originally scheduled to be decommissioned this month, but it had its service life extended 10 years.
The anti-nuclear lobby has kind of shot themselves in the foot. By fighting new plants tooth and nail, they have caused outdated plants to remain in service longer than planned. Even if you overhaul the system completely, design improvements in new reactors can't be added.
As to catastrophic modes of failure... The problem is we don't have any better viable options.
Coal - Many would consider this a catastrophic mode of operation. Coal is notorious for spewing carcinogens into the air. Between living 5 miles from a first-gen nuke plant and a coal plant - I'll take the nuke plant. With the nuke plant there's a tiny chance I might get exposed to something toxic. With the coal plant it's guaranteed.
Gas - Similarly, "catastrophic mode of operation" - Gas burns clean, but the methods we use to obtain it are anything but. Five or so years of hydrofracturing operations as part of gas drilling have sickened and injured far more people than the entire history of nuclear in the United States. Probably more than the entire history of nuclear excluding Chernobyl. (Being a dangerous experiment gone wrong and not really an acccident, I consider Chernobyl independently from other nuclear incidents.)
Wind/Solar - Not suitable for baseload generation, unpredictable and inconsistent, requires building MORE coal or gas (more likely gas since gas plants can change output faster) to fill in the holes. We need to invest more in these, but they are not suitable as our only baseload electrical source until we make vast improvements in energy storage.
Hydro - Catastrophic failure mode present, has to date killed FAR more people than nuclear (even including Chernobyl), we're also basically tapped out as far as places to put new hydro plants
Nuclear (By building new plants with improved safety - the ESBWR design has passive safety measures that would have resulted in the current situation being a non-issue) is our most viable option. However, the current approach of extending the service life of old plants is NOT a safe approach.
Much of the article seemed reasonable, but I agree with you - the author lost a LOT of credibility when downplaying Chernobyl that significantly.
I do believe that it is valid to point out, regarding Chernobyl, that most of the estimates of the total number of long-term deaths it caused put things around 4000 or so. This is less than even the initial estimates of immediate short-term life loss from the quake and tsunami.
To his credit, the radiation from a pack of cigarettes isn't the problem, it's the chemical toxins.
That said - It's clear that some people at Fukushima have had enough exposure for longterm effects at this point. Just how much those affects are and if they are worse than chainsmoking - unknown.
If it makes that big of a difference in iOS, that just means iOS is broken.
Non-tablet apps run just fine without tweaks in nearly all situations on Android tablets. I haven't used a single tablet-optimized app on my Huawei S7 - they just properly handled the lcd.density variable and adjusted their rendering to take into account the difference.
Another way you could interpret it is,
"The number of Android applications that require specific tablet optimizations jumped from 16 to 37, while iOS is so broken that 65,000+ apps had to be tweaked to run on the iPad properly"
This is one of the dumbest arguments against Android I have ever seen. Normal Android apps run fine on a tablet without optimizations.
The number of "tablet-optimized" iOS apps says to me two things:
1) A bunch of people are slapping "Tablet-optimized" onto their apps without doing anything significant for marketing purposes
2) There are fundamental architectural shortcomings of iOS that make it more difficult for apps to provide a good experience on a tablet without optimization.
I know that in the case of Android, some of the apps I have used took advantage of the disparity in screen size (mainly because Android has an LCD density parameter that apps can base their rendering off of), despite not being "tablet optimized". (Parallel Kingdom is one such example - you see MUCH more of the map on tablet devices, simply due to different LCD density settings.)
Part of it is that the iPad 1 was the first tablet to come out with a successful formula. Since then, some manufacturers have been intelligent enough to implement the same successful formula.
The short summary of the secret: Scaling up an OS designed for touchscreen phones (iOS, Android) to tablet size (the approach first used by iPad 1 and used by other companies since then) works, scaling down a desktop OS (Windows) to a tablet (the usual approach prior to iPad 1) doesn't.
Microsoft still hasn't learned - they're still trying to stick Windows 7 into tablets. FAIL.
Edge flipping is something I consider to be a MAJOR boost to my productivity, compared to having to minimize/maximize windows to manage my screen real estate.
This was actually the #1 reason for me leaving GNOME - not only was it removed as an option, they seem to have made it a crusade to prevent it from even being added as a third-party addon. There was a program called Brightside that added edge-flipping to GNOME, but eventually the APIs it used were broken in such a manner that the Brightside maintainer gave up. The day Brightside finally stopped working is when I finally made the switch to KDE.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but the "total levelized system cost" is lower than:
Half of the natural gas fired technologies - so far the natural gas industry in the US has made far more people sick in just a few years of hydrofracking than the entire history of nuclear in this country
Lower than Advanced Coal with CCS, only slightly higher than other coal variants - We're running out of coal, and at this point are blowing up entire mountains to get it
Way lower than solar or wind
On par with hydro - but our hydro resources are tapped out, there is little to no room to build any more
You are incorrect - Chernobyl was, indeed, fundamentally unsafe by design (nothing to do with age here), partially because it was a derivative of a reactor design whose primary purpose was weapons material generation, not safe power generation.
1) Positive void coefficient due to a graphite moderator (unlike nearly all non-Soviet power reactors where coolant = moderator)
2) No containment measures whatsoever (all US reactors have extremely strong containment buildings, such that even in the case of a full core meltdown, the core should not breach containment.)
3) They were running a dangerous experiment - you are correct there. However, the safety measures didn't fail due to bad maintenance, they failed because they were disabled (part of the "dangerous" component of the experiment).
We have had a few incidents of partial meltdowns (Three Mile Island, and it is looking like Fukushima suffered a partial meltdown) in history, none of which resulted in any core material breaching containment. We have never had a reactor reach a state of full-core meltdown. I do not believe we have ever had a power generation reactor breach containment in history (see 2) above - no containment was breached because there was none to breach in the first place.)
"My main hope here is, that scientists in near future will find a better way to handle all or at least the most dangerous of those substances. Maybe if fusion energy would be available, we could bash the stuff with some extra accelerated neurons to make something harmless out of it. Maybe even something useful. (I know that this is most likely nonsense from a scientific view. Just meant as a kind of abstract picture)"
We already have one technique - it's called reprocessing. Unfortunately, that word is a very dirty one (for archaic reasons - the first reprocessing method that was widely used happened to be good for producing weapons materials.) in the United States. It's why most other countries don't have the waste handling problem we do.
There were also reactor designs that were being researched (such as the IFR) that would produce far less long-lived waste and, if I recall correctly, could even "burn" the waste from current reactors. Killed by uneducated politicians for somehow being a "proliferation risk" - yet reactor designs which are far more suitable to making weapons materials (including fundamentally unsafe RBMKs which were designed primarily for making weapons materials and then repurposed to power generation) continue to be used.
And as to bombarding waste with neutrons from fusion - I recall seeing some articles on this. Who knows, for a long time it may be the only form of fusion energy we'll see. (Fusion for neutron generation is already possible - so combining these techniques with a subcritical fission reactor might work even when we can't get pure fusion viable for power generation.)
Neither of which can provide consistent baseload power. Both of which are unavailable in many regions (either not enough wind, or not enough solar flux)
Nope. If you read the articles in more detail, what happened is the unit failed EMI testing. The end reaction to the failure indicates the hole probably occurred somewhere around 2.4 GHz - however at power levels WELL above what any consumer wifi device is capable of producing (But below that of the standard).
But the FAA is VERY conservative, so a radiated susceptibility hole in the band for a device = kill all emitters in that band, even weak ones, if that device is in use.
The point is - removing spectrum from them is a bad idea.
Basically - in emergencies, the ham bands already DO get used for emergency purposes. It's on a volunteer basis, but it's almost unheard of for non-emergency hams to fail to vacate a frequency in favor of emergency users.
If you take 70cm away from hams, the end result will likely be:
You gain the band for emergency use (wait, you already effectively had it!)
You lose a lot of frustrated hams - so not only do you effectively lose the other ham bands, you lose a bunch of trained radio operators with emergency experience (or at least emergency training)
It's pretty clear that there are some massive egos/control-freaks within those running the GNOME project.
As far as user interfaces go, it is Havoc Pennington's way or the highway. Havoc has this crazy "usability comes from crippling" approach that dumbs down GNOME for entry-level users but makes it wholly unusable for power users.
Whereas KDE keeps "entry level" defaults and makes some of the niche/advanced configuration options (such as edge flipping) harder to find, GNOME's approach is to outright remove the feature. There are only so many features you can remove before your approach becomes unusable for many.
That's why I used to be a staunch GNOME supporter and fairly anti-KDE (I'm still not a fan of how they handled the Qt/GPL license incompatibilities, the issue didn't get resolved until Qt was effectively forced to change their license. The KDE developers had a consistent attitude that there was no problem and refused to take any approach to address), but have now pretty much changed over entirely to KDE. Around the same time the KDE license incompatibility issue was resolved is when Havoc began his reign of "cripple it in the name of usability" terror. Not only did the GNOME team remove edge flipping, they made it as difficult as possible to add it in after the fact (Brightside effectively broke after every GNOME release, and eventually GNOME broke the interfaces Brightside used to the point where the Brightside maintainer gave up.) It's always been there in KDE.
Yes, the KDE team has gotten a bad rep from KDE 4.0 getting shipped too early. I don't think there was any graceful way to do things here - there always comes a time when a project has to do a major rearchitecture, and sometimes that can't be done without some user pain. Later KDE4 releases are excellent. The key here is - KDE went through some pain in order to greatly improve the flexibility of the platform and leave them room to grow. GNOME didn't - in the short term that was good for GNOME, but in the long term that inflexibility is going to hurt.
Actually if you look through details, it sounds like an EMI hole below that which is specified by the relevant standard was within the 2.4 GHz band.
This hole was nowhere near deep enough for a WiFi device to actually exceed the threshold, but the FAA is VERY conservative when it comes to civilian airliners - Any hole in that band = eliminate all transmitters in that band just to be sure.
Yup. This is because ILS is an old and very finicky interference-sensitive system (It basically relies on determining where within an RF "pencil beam" coming from the end of the runway you are). The concern is that leakage from just the clocks in an active device could throw off the ILS system's accuracy.
Once you're airborne, ILS doesn't matter, and the remaining navigational systems are far less interference-prone.
Yeah, but this isn't a navigation system itself, it's a display unit. I agree that nav systems such as VOR/ILS, TACAN, etc. are very interference-susceptible, which is the reason for "all electronic devices off during takeoff/landing" - but that's not actually the case here.
Wrong.
Carriers install instant messengers on their phones that use SMS as a transport and not IP. (This practice is getting less frequent as time goes by, but a LOT of mobile IM clients do this!). They do NOT detect "SMS-like" IP data and bill it as SMS.
Another reason why stock ROMs from carriers suck.
You're probably in fairly good shape with Android or iOS, as I don't think any IM apps exist for Android that use SMS as the transport instead of IP. However, feature phones, fakesmartphones (you know, those touchscreen phones NOT running one of the major platforms), and some of the older mobile platforms (WM5/WM6) are at risk for the "old and evil" IM apps.
I think the issue is that previously, RedHat shipped a bunch of independent patch files, split by "issue fixed/function added"
Your method generates a single "megapatch" file.
Whoops. (I wasn't sure, hence my comment that I might have swapped the two)