Well... apparently, not always. In 2010, "the National Transportation Safety Board had asked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to install automatic fire extinguisher systems in the holds of cargo aircraft. UPS Airlines followed FAA regulations, which stated that pilots should depressurize the main cabin and climb to an altitude of at least 20,000 feet (6,100 m) upon detection of a fire so as to deprive the flames of oxygen."

In other words, the procedure was to climb to high altitude and depressurize the main cabin. For UPS Airlines flight 6, that didn't work out. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ).

However, they had a whole container with thousands of Li-Ion batteries going up. That was the reason passenger flights are now banned from taking on such cargo. It's very dangerous. On july 29, 2011, another cargo flight (an Asiana Airlines B747) with a similar cargo was lost at sea after the pilot put out a mayday shouting "cargo fire" and "emergency". They were carrying Li-Metal and Li-Ion batteries in the hold as well.

Since then, recommendations are that: containers with batteries should be declared; such containers should be put in a class C hold or another hold with alternative fire suppression (not Halon because that is ineffective against Li-Metal fires) and people would have to be aware what to do in case of a cargo hold fire.

I'm not sure those recommendations are now mandatory.

From http://batteryuniversity.com/l... (I looked it up because I was thinking the same as you did):

"If the fire occurs in an airplane, the FAA instructs flight attendants to use water or pop soda. Water-based products are most readily available and are appropriate since Li-ion contains very little lithium metal that would react with water. Water also cools the adjacent area and prevents the fire from spreading. Many research laboratories and factories also use water to put out Li-ion battery fires."

This doesn't work on Lithium Metal batteries, so:

"When encountering a fire with a lithium-metal battery, only use a Class D extinguisher as water would react with the lithium metal and make the fire worse. With all battery fires, allow ample of ventilation while the battery burns itself out."

I translate that as "fumes will still kill every passenger on board, but at least we can recover the bodies."

Sorry!

Replace US with USSR and DHS with FSB and I wouldn't have blinked twice at it - par for the course. And increasingly so for the USA, apparently.

My main requirements for my new phone a few weeks ago were:
- should run Android
- should not be worse than my old phone (in terms of performance, android version and storage)
- should be smaller than my old phone (Samsung Galaxy S2)

I went with the Samsung S4 mini because it was on sale. But a lot of phones qualify. Just not the big flagship ones. Apparently they double as e-peens, so I predict that they will keep increasing in size until we get to size "ludicrous".

A shield strap would be nice on the bigger ones. Or they should make it like a gauntlet, like you see in some movies.

I keep seeing Informix pop up now and then, but I never meet anyone who actually uses it. The marketing blurb looks interesting though, but given that it's IBM, the pricetag is probably of the kind that "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

I'm using SQL Server 2012 now (first time I ever used SQL Server for serious data loads) and I have to say it performs pretty good as a data warehouse for a moderate size organisation. We're loading 500 million lines and it seems to hold up well on a single mid-range server. Querying the whole set is not a pleasant experience if you do a full scan, but if the index is selective enough we get okay performance out of that as well.

Over the last decade most of my deployments were on Oracle but I think that for almost any business I know, SQL Server is a pretty good alternative. I'm not so impressed with the query performance but update/insert performance is much better that I know of Oracle.

However... if you need decent materialized views, or analytical functions, or really low-level control over the database, Oracle is still the first contender. Statistics are easier to manage on SQL Server, though.

However... the SQL Server pricing is not as low as it once was, and climbing steadily into Oracle territory. So unless Microsoft can keep the price down, it may not offer much of an alternative.

I hadn't considered that, but it actually makes a lot of sense.

Dang! Any chance you could get me a nice offer on those?

MongoDB is a document database. If I wanted a document database to story the company data I would have switched to Lotus Domino a long time ago.

It's not just buggy as hell, it's also slow as molasses due to their insistence on using Java everywhere, and not particularly well-written Java at that. Add to that a really weird method of using the database and you have a horrible experience.

I like Apex and Oracle SQL Developer though. Still somewhat buggy, but at least they're free.

Actually, the last time this was debated here I brought up a similar point, and someone else pointed out that banks don't use ACID but mostly use eventual consistency for their transaction systems. That does cause them to lose (a lot of) money sometimes, but they write it off against the expenses of real-time ACID compliance.

For the majority of cases where MariaDB is sufficient, you'd probably get away with using MSAccess in the background.

It's something like a unicorn: a mythical creature that doubles as strawman for discussion purposes.

You and GP are debating different things. The social indicators for black people can be better than today *especially* in a situation of heavy discrimination. South Africa is a case in point: a colleague of mine was educated in South Africa by fantastic teachers, as a coloured /not entirely black kid from a middle class background. The biggest reason was that the smart folks did not get the chance for any of the really good jobs, or starting a company. So a whole lot of them became good teachers. Nowadays, most of the smarter people have real opportunities and the schools are left with whoever wants to get a low-paying job with no real qualifications or oversight.

Of course, another reason for the current situation is the high income disparity in the USA, that ensured that the minority that eventually did get opportunities would reap big rewards while the rest would have trouble to make ends meet every month. Nearly the same thing as we can see happening in South Africa nowadays, except it's going much faster there.