quite possibly.

We certainly don't have any backups on-orbit if one of the operational GOES sats goes down, having just activated the last of the backups.

Not even sure we have anything in the planning stages yet, much less under construction and/or scheduled to be launched.

Which doesn't excuse a "we won't be able to forecast hurricanes because GOES-13 failed!!!" headline....

To be fair, "making it impossible to predict weather patterns on the East Coast", to me at least, made it sound like GOES-14 was not nearly as ready to take over for GOES-13 as you are saying it is.

True enough. There's no doubt that TFS just screams "we're all gonna die, Die, DIE!"

Which is, alas, all too common these days. Sensationalism FTW....

Unfortunately, because of Republican intransigence in Congress, they haven't been able to build and launch a new bird.

Didn't read even TFS, I see.

They've already activated the back-up satellite (GOES-14), which has been in orbit waiting for this for four years now (launched in 2009).

Lucky you. Last time the subject came up for me (long time ago, I admit), it wasn't a private sale, it was from a dealer. And he required a dealer in my home state to transfer the gun to me....

nor did we take potassium iodide supplements.

How do you know that the Navy wasn't just dumping into your chow?

Due to an injury I suffered once, I was unable to do do my normal job for a couple weeks. During the period, I was detailed as a cook's assistant (which pissed the cook off no end, since he had no more use for a one-armed man than the engineering dept did) - the food came from commercial sources (yeah, we used the same canned foods that you buy in grocery stores, just in job lots), and didn't include any special ingredients (unless you count the occasional bit of cook-spit....)

you damn well should have been taking the supplements if you were working anywhere near the reactor. The last thing you want is the thyroid absorbing radioactive isotopes.

You seem to be under the impression that a Naval reactor is a big tub of water filled with fuel rods, that we stirred by hand.

We used what's called a Pressurized Water Reactor. The contamination (those radioisotopes you're so concerned about) stayed in the primary loop, and we stayed outside the reactor compartment (for the most part - I got the majority of the total dosage I received in one night when the job required me to run into the (shutdown) reactor compartment for a couple minutes of every ten minutes all night long).

Yes we have storms, typhoons they're called, the bad ones batter the city with 250 km/hr winds for 8-12 hours straight, dumbing in the tune of 500-1000 mm of rain.

Sounds like Katrina.

The underground trains continue service even under those weather conditions.

Alas, can't really do underground trains all that well when the water table is a foot under your yard.

Zero?

It's normal when working in a nuclear plant to be taking potassium iodide on a regular basis, which isn't something that the general populace is likely to be doing. It's also not typical for the general populace to be wearing protective gear either.

Really?

I've never worked civilian nuclear power, but when I was a Navy Nuke, we didn't wear protective gear, nor did we take potassium iodide supplements.

I dislike magazine safeties, mostly because they make lowering the hammer an intrinsically unsafe thing to do.

But I still own several pistols with magazine safeties, because I'm too much the packrat to sell them.

It has a magazine safety? I thought one of the major benefits of the original 1911 design is that it did NOT have a magazine safety? Perhaps my knowledge is incorrect.

And perhaps I am thinking of a later iteration than the original 1911.

Would be bad that criminals owning guns fire at police or soldiers, after all, so maybe would be nice to add a provision to avoid all people shooting at them.

I'd be willing to bet a lot of criminals would be in favour of interlocks on guns so they couldn't be used to shoot police or soldiers.

Think of the possibilities - steal a cop's uniform (or whatever the key is that the gun uses to determine that the target is a cop), and no gun will fire at you! Brilliant!

Feel free to amend it out of existence. If you can.

But until then, it's the law of the land, so get over your attitude that if it's good enough for you, it's good enough for anyone.

so many gun owners are so lax about safety.

Which, presumably, is why we have upwards of 10,000,000 accidental shootings every year.

Oh, wait, we don't, do we?

Note that the number of accidental shootings we have every year suggests that the number of "lax about safety" gun owners is less than 0.1%....

Colt 1911 has THREE safeties, as I recall - grip, manual, and magazine.

The grip safety is usually skipped on modern self-loading pistols, they make do with just two.