That was underwhelming. I’d much rather see NASA’s or SpaceX’s or Roskosmos’s take on this. AKA the entities that actually have the means to pull this off.
Why though?
I he felt he was not ready for the position, he should have applied for a lower one. Though the lower you go, the more you are expected to perform and if you don't, face the consequences....
It takes time for a leader to get to know a new organization when the join it. They are not privy to that level of insider information before getting inside. Whether a CEO is ready for a position is a question of skills, not a question of knowledge. During the first few months, the focus is on gaining knowledge, not skills. So yes. Give the guy a break. This could in no way have been expected to be high on his priority list if the threat was already dealt with.
Take a single issue we, as outside observers, know Uber is wrestling with... saaaaay ongoing litigation about self-driving cars, or internal sexual harassment and cultural issues, or national legal campaigns that threaten their business... two months is veeery little time to get a good handle on them.
And that's not even considering the time a CEO needs just to take a single meeting with relevant internal stakeholders and leaders, and get their outlook settings dialed in.
Where by “people” you probably mean the lobbyists from Google/Facebook/Netflix and other internet companies who would have to share a fraction of their fat profit margins to deliver their stuff to you.
As the present predicament shows “advice of the people” means jack squat to the FCC, just like it did in 2015.
Those companies contribute a significant part of their margins to deliver content to you, including paying for servers, programmers, sysadmins, and so on to actually make the product. And then by colocating, peering, or other arrangements that pay for their own connection to the internet. I pay for my connection, they pay for theirs, that seems entirely fair. It's not my fault I have to pay more than they do because of no competition in last mile service -- that's the FCC's fault.
I still remember the reports on TV from there at the time. Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day), and it became clear that it can’t be swept under the rug, we started seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning. The radiation was so strong that the TV helicopter filming the reactor from above (which in itself was heroic given the kinds of shit suspended in the air) would show the most radioactive part with sort of a haze. Endless streams of trucks pouring concrete, etc, etc. It was 30 years ago so I don’t remember much, but man to get the Secretary General to admit such a bad fuckup — that was something truly extraordinary.
Note also this was very close to May holidays (May 1st etc.) when people customary go out, with kids, some go camping, etc. Kiev - a city with population over 2 millions - is 90 km from Chernobyl, and nobody there knew what's going on for a while. I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced. And of course when it was known there was no proper information on dealing with radioactive contaminations, mostly everybody would go by wildest rumors and home remedies. No tools for measuring radioactivity either anywhere to be bought, people made their own eventually. Etc., etc.
And we are lucky for it. If the runaway core had reached the water table beneath, it would have exploded and irradiated most of Eastern Europe, if not the whole continent.
That's the case for any nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl isn't special in that regard. If you have a very dense blob of liquid fuel (called corium after a meltdown) generating megawatts of power it's going to melt through concrete and steel, it's just a matter of time. Once that blob hits a ton of water underneath it forcing all of that water to heat up will create enormous pressure and the only way out is up.
The accident was acknowledged by Soviet news on April 28th, two days after it took place. While they were slow to provide details there was no public denial - they initially denied anything was wrong in response to private inquiries by Swedish diplomats since elevated radiation levels were measured in Sweden. This is an ABC news report from the time which also shows the Soviet announcement.
That may have been what they said to the Western media. It does not necessarily match what they said to their own government run TV channels and newspapers.
What do you mean? The Soviet announcement is right there in the video. It's an announcement on Vremya, the official evening news TV program broadcast across the Soviet Union.
The accident happened on April 26th, and was acknowledged 36 hours after when they began to evacuate Pripyat, a town in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl. As I said, it took about a day for them to acknowledge it, and it was only acknowledged when it became clear that it could not be swept under the rug. Your video does not contradict that.
You wrote "Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day)". That's not what happened, you can look it up in any of the numerous timelines and accounts of the accident and the reporting and Soviet disclosures. The evacuation of Pripyat started before the first public Soviet announcement as described here:
Maybe it's been edited since you supplied the wikipedia link, but it doesn't support your narrative.
One page down, it describes Ukrainian Soviet officials claiming there was no danger from the accident to regional Ukrainian SSR officials. It says that Pripyat was only evacuated 24 hours after the disaster, after more than 50 residents were hospitalized for radiation poisoning.
Even then, the letter to the residents was that the evacuation was temporary, and primarily as a precautionary measure.
The only thing you effectively refute is the timeline, Pripyat was evacuated 24, not 36 hours later, as the parent poster erroneously stated.
The wikipedia article doesn't mention internal Soviet press releases, so you haven't refuted that Ukrainian or Russian officials denied a disaster. However, the parent poster nor the OP haven't demonstrated that officials lied to the public either.
This isn't from April 26th 1986. How can it possibly be, the 'Western press' didn't know about the accident then. It's also not a 'flat out denial anything had happened at all', you're just misremembering that part.
" seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning"
I heard those hero's had mostly no clue, that they were on a heroic suicide mission, nor did they had any choice in the matter. Knowing a bit about UDSSR I can very well imagine this to be true, but does anyone knows more?
edit:
this article confirms it, but I am not sure if the site is reliable (it quotes the "socialist worker")
If someone from Mozilla is reading this: I (and I suspect many other people who prefer to strictly segregate their “work” and “personal” data), would very much prefer if you implemented built-in profile switching a-la Chrome. This shouldn’t even be that hard given that FF already supports profiles. This is, and has always been, an obstacle for me to seriously consider Firefox as my only browser.
I know about those, but they are almost the opposite of what I want to have: instead of completely separating the two worlds, they forcibly merge them in the same browser instance (and Sync account).
You can also use command line flags to do the same. For example, you can run `firefox --profile $(mktemp -d) --new-instance` to create a temporary, throwaway profile. (Change --new-instance to --no-remote on Windows).
The reason why I have doubts is that Intel has proven to be a rather weak competitor in anything other than multi- (but not many-) core x86. And their haphazard software strategy seems to be a major factor here. Especially the way Larrabee/Xeon Phi has gone so far, their push for OpenCL is IMO too little too late. Instead, OpenMP was promoted, with the vectorization basically brushed off as the magic the compiler will do for you... well it won't, and if it doesn't, you have no way to compete against Nvidia GPUs. Time will show whether they've now recognised this and work together with AMD in an effective way, but yeah...
