Well, Windscale was never used for civilian power production. I think nearly all of the reactors designed for weapons production were far less safe than nearly any civilian design.

And yeah, the Magnox reactors weren't very safe either, although they're better IMO than the RBMK design.

CANDU are, to my knowledge, the only other civilian reactors in use to have a positive void coefficient, but at least in their case the moderator (heavy water) isn't flammable...

More likely it is the carriers and not LG.

This is why I refuse to buy carrier-branded phones nowadays.

I haven't heard too many issues about Sony LP... That said, right around when they deployed LP to the Z3 is when I finally unlocked the bootloader and started running Omni on it.

That said - 5.0 was in general a steaming pile of poo, which is why so many OEMs are just skipping to 5.1 now. 5.0 was such poo that Google changed the version number to get away from the stigma, in reality, 5.1 was more like a 5.0.3... But it was important in that it fixed the biggest issues with 5.0.x

You're not guaranteed regular updates with Cyngn phones either.

They burned their first hardware partner even more than they burned OnePlus with the MicroMax exclusivity mess - the Oppo N1 didn't get a KitKat update from Cyngn until November 2014.

Cyngn corporate is "just another OEM" - same BS.

Moto G is most definitely not water resistant. Any member of Sony's Xperia Z family - yes. Moto G - no.

I never had any issues with my Nexus 4 or Nexus 5. LG's hardware is pretty good, it's their software that is utterly atrocious (generally a common theme for Asian companies, partly because Asian markets seem to care more about how shiny and colorful their skin is than whether their phone is a bugridden POS running outdated software...), which is why I will never buy an LG device that is not a Nexus. (Same goes for Samsungs... I used to be a heavy Samsung user, but after the way they handled Superbrick... never again...)

If the difference is only in the radios, no need for Canadian kernel source.

Usually the international source for most devices is the least mangled.

Before anyone rants about GPL violations - they only have to release source if they released a binary. They haven't released a binary.

Except in the 80s in the Soviet union, where many of their "civilian" reactors were designed to allow for use as weapons production plants.

Such as Chernobyl... So many things went wrong there, but one of the major contributing factors was a fundamentally unsafe reactor design.

Gas is not the best option. It may burn clean, but the process of extracting it is NOT clean.

The problem is that the contamination is much more diffuse/widespread, so you can't say "OMG LOOK THREE MILE ISLAND! BAD!" - even though TMI led to less negative health effects for the environment than gas drilling in just a single town (Dimock, PA).

Solar and wind won't be able to meet our needs for another few decades as we don't have sufficient energy storage technology to make them viable yet (Tesla's making great strides here, but one has to wonder - what might the hidden environmental costs here be? For example, the permanent magnet motors used in nearly all electric and hybrid vehicles use rare earth magnets - http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...

We need one more generation of nuclear to bridge the gap, using modernized reactors with improved safety. (Ideally, research into improved reactors/fuel cycles like the IFR wouldn't have been killed 2 decades ago and they'd be ready for construction now... If I recall one calculation, the IFR could've met our energy needs for 100 years using only the stockpiles of LWR waste we had in the mid-late 1990s.)

Vitrification may be OK for the high-level short-lived (approx. 200 years to decay to safe levels) stuff that would have come out of the IFR's integrated fuel cycle, but I'm fairly certain it's not OK for long-lived transuranics...

IIRC, wasn't that in partnership with Altera?

Intel and Altera have been partnering on things for quite a while, including Altera being one of the first companies to be allowed access to spare Intel fab production capacity.

Yup. Cyngn could have been a positive thing for the Android community, but the complete lack of ethics of those involved is scary... Cyngn has been bad news since the beginning (Focal)...

Two options:
1) The "workaround" of installing GMS from an alternative source. (In theory, the only legal option is installing gapps backed up from your own phone, but Google appears to be willing to let the "separate gapps packages" slide...)
2) The approach Cyngn has gone, which is to go through Google's official GMS licensing scheme.

Interesting question. It looks like it isn't air-in-magnesium - it's hollow air-filled SiC beads inside magnesium.

(TFA doesn't mention the SiC part directly, but you can find more info in the linked research paper from TFA.)

There's also: "Since one of the chief selling points of autonomous cars is their relative safety over cars piloted by humans, the lack of official transparency is troubling."

No it is NOT a selling point, because NO ONE is selling these cars yet. It is EXPECTED to be a selling point once development is complete - WHICH IT IS NOT.

That said, it would be interesting to hear the details of Google's two autonomous accidents.

Also, the headline is misleading... While a car may be capable of self-driving, if a human is in control when an accident occurs, then the car was not a self-driving one as far as the accident goes.

As far as the national statistics (0.3 accidents per 100,000 miles) - those are national statistics, averaged across the entire country. Google's accidents all occurred with mileage racked up in the Bay Area, which is probably one of the worst places in the country to drive as far as hitting other vehicles.

Body cameras will help a little, but they won't solve the problem.

Expect body cameras worn by corrupt cops to have serious reliability issues.