Yes, I'm well aware of the stale connection hack. (I've mentioned it here before.) However, I wouldn't trust it for something time critical. An IM client or IRC chat room will survive a temporary delay if the connection is lost. A real-time auction OTOH would not be so forgiving. Plus the overhead of the HTTP POST could delay a bid long enough to change the outcome.
Like I said, AJAX doesn't work in the rare situation where the data is both time critical AND requires data to be pushed.:-)
Re:What about security?
on
PHP 5 Recipes
·
· Score: 2, Funny
That's not as big of a problem as you're making it out to be. Some types of Mainframes relied on stateless communications years before the web was invented. As long as you can get the data you need when you need it, the protocol doesn't matter. Granted, AJAX is unsuitable for anything that's time senstive and requires data to be pushed immediately (such as a live auction), but those applications are rare and can always be done with a Java or Flash applet.
Thank you for proving my point. That $99 kit that you linked to has a Spartan 2 XC3S200.
I'm hardly proving your point when you can't even tell the difference between a Spartan 2 and a Spartan 3.
That part has the equivalent of 200,000 gates.
Yep.
Do you really think that you could put an UltraSparc in that little space?
Nope. I was just addressing your point about FPGAs not being for beginners. If your point was intended to be that UltraSPARCs aren't for beginners, then I agree with you.:-)
(Not that it would hurt anything if newbies played with the compiled code in a testing framework a bit. Lotsa stuff you can learn.)
You would want something with a gate count in the millions. And even if you could fit it in there, that part only has 27KB of block ram, so your cache would be quite small. Performace would, in a word, suck.
*shrug* FPGAs are proof of concept devices that work great for development. You've got maybe 100-200 MHz to work with. You can go for some cheap ASICs from Europractice and push it up to ~1GHz. After that, you need to sub-contract a *real* fab.
And when I say hundreds of hours, that includes getting up to speed with the FPGA software, and interfacing the system to other devices. At the very least, you will need an DRAM interface, or some sort of "northbridge" interface to something that can talk to DRAM. And after that, you will need to get an OS running on it in order to really do anything with it. This entire process can take hundreds of hours and will stretch you in hardware and software.
Not everyone is going to be a hardware wizard overnight. But that doesn't mean they can't get a few designs up and running in a minimal amount of time. For example, the Spartan 3 board comes with a well-documented SRAM interface. Perhaps not great for a full UltraSPARC, but you should be able to get a 6502 clone or LEON up and running on it in a short period of time. Xilinx and those at OpenCores have really been making an effort to make it easy for newbies to learn hardware design.:-)
I work with FPGAs for a living, so I know a little about this.
Well I don't work with FPGAs for a living, and I don't know jack. So HAH!
I doubt that Sun were even suggesting that. My guess is that the Slashdot editors added that.
The italics are the poster (i.e. me), not the editors. Read this thread for more info.
They read that the 486 only used a few hundred thousand transistors while the P4 uses a few hundred million. And the first thought they have is, "Wow! You could like make a CPU with a thousand 486s on it and have a supercomputer on a chip! Why isn't Intel doing this??? I must post my idea to a newsgroup immediately!". And of course the answer is that in practice the idea sucks. There are minor practical problems like pin count, memory bandwidth, heat dissipation and writing massively parallel code.
Are those the only problems? Pff.
Pin Count - Use the I2C protocol and route the instructions inside the chip. Memory Bandwidth - I hope you have one hell of a registry file to use as a cache.;-) Heat - Nothing new here Massively Parallel Code - How about massive numbers of programs running in parallel?
Seriously, though, the real problem is that people tend not to understand that parallel processing does not equal faster processing. Sure, you can cram 32 execution threads into a single chip (which, BTW, is exactly what the UltraSPARC T1 is), but it's only going to be useful for certain cases. It won't make Quake III run any faster, but it sure as heck will allow a loaded down Web Server strut its stuff in style.
Needless to say, this is not a beginners project by any means. But is it possible for a few hundred dollars and a few hundred hours.
Nonsense! Beginners do it all the time. All you need is $99 to get yourself a Spartan 3 Starter Kit, the free WebPack ISE tools that Xilinx bundles, and a lot of perseverance in learning VHDL, Verilog, JHDL, or some other Hardware Design Language of choice.
As a bonus, the Starter Kit comes with manuals targetted right at newbies to hardware design. It's so easy to understand the hardware layouts of the board that a monkey could do it, and the booklet explaining the history and usage of FGPAs is most informative. Pick up an understanding of Logic Gates from Wikipedia, and you should be ready to get started. (Personally, I think JHDL is the best place to start because it forces you to deal with the actual gates. Once you get that clear in your head VHDL and Verilog become much easier to master.)
Pardon my threadjack, but I just realized that the editors secretly switched my link for a competing brand. Unlike Folgers, I'm afraid it's much cooler to get processor news straight from the horse's mouth.
Excuse me, but I didn't I just say the same thing in the *fine* Summary? As I said, this is "new" because Sun is Open Sourcing one of their top-of-the-line processors instead of a knockoff chip.
And wasn't UltraSPARC one of the platforms OpenBSD was having difficulty porting to?
As I understand it, the processor was never the problem. The SPARC architecture is well documented and easily obtainable. It was all the other fiddley bits of hardware that have made life difficult for OSS developers.:-)
Believe it or not, I was joking about that. I had a whole post typed up giving a few more specifics and inviting others to comment, but the story failed to appear before I needed to catch the train.:-)
I probably wouldn't have mentioned the FPGA except for the fact that Sun makes a really odd comment on the site about "not knowing an FPGA from an RTL". I'm not quite certain what they're getting at, but it's always possible they're going to have a single core, single thread, cut-down version that CAN fit on an FPGA.
And sometimes, you will be able to find a news that is free on one site, and by subscription on another (eg NYTimes vs CNN).
Which is how Capitalism is supposed to work. I realize that many companies are just looking after their own interests, but they probably don't even realize that they're actually being anti-competitive and that "fair-use" is intended to cover exactly this type of situation.
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but a LOT of American television is being produced out of Canada these days. Personally, that doesn't concern me in the slightest. As long as Canada keeps producing such great shows as Stargate and Red Green, I'll be happy to let them take the lead for all of North America.:-)
Tune into it on PBS sometime and you'll find that there is still some good American humor left, despite what "Airplane" did to the rest of it. Unfortunately, the 'Brits probably won't get it.
As for the Yuvchenko quote: I think you misunderstand me. I have no problem with nuclear power. It's done safely in the US, France and other countries. But I *do* have a problem with people trying to pass off Chernobyl as "no biggie".
In that case, sir, you have misunderstood me. I have never once called Chernobyl "no biggie" or anything to that effect. I called it a tragedy, but highly overstated by the media.
Everything else you have stated has been your personal feelings on the issue, and are not representative of any established facts. I understand your family has gone through tough times, and you have my sympathies. I lost my father to cancer when I was a small child, so I've been there. But to accuse others of inventing facts and demeaning the tragedies because of your own feelings only serves to demean all those who have suffered.
WHOA, WHOA, WHOA. Slow down people! Everyone's automatically assuming that caffine is the key ingredient here. Yet no one has yet made the connection that both Coffee and Black Tea also contain copious quantities of Tannic Acid. Soda pops such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, and RC also share this characteristic. For all we know, they could do a study next week that finds drinking 32oz of Cola per day has the same "health" effect.
From the sound of this article, this was probably a preliminary study. i.e. They surveyed 10,000 people to get their responses, established that some effect was beating the statistical odds, then published their results. From here they will try to get funding to do more thorough studies, and potentially isolate the exact compound responsible for the statistical difference.
These are the real figures from sources other than the Soviet goverment. I'll say again, the death figures have been highly overstated by the media.
Try telling something as stupid and cruel as "Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated" to my grandfather, whose tumorous thyroids were removed earlier this year.
My best wishes to you and your grandfather. I hope his recovery has been swift and as painless as possible.
I realize that you and many others have personal feelings on the issue. What the Soviet government did with Chernobyl was NOT a good thing. Especially to the fire fighters and soldiers who weren't told what the problem was. Or the people allowed to gawk at the pretty lights coming out of the reactor building. Or allowing people to remain long enough to eat and drink from the local resources. Or a million other things the Soviet Union did completely wrong to make the situation worse.
But nothing is gained by overstating the event.
Consider the case of Alexander Yuvchenko. He was in the reactor itself, and suffered FAR worse effects from the event than yourself or your grandfather. Here's what he has to say:
Q: What do you think about nuclear power?
A: I'm fine about it, as long as safety is put head and shoulders above any other concern, financial or whatever. If you keep safety as your number one priority at all stages of planning and running a plant, it should be OK.
Considering what he has been through, he's a truely amazing man.
... so your saying little radiation got out, just radioisotopes? Of course, radioisotopes are not at all radioactive and don't emit any form of dangerous radiation at all do they
You have missed my point, sir. My point was that leaking radiation is not a serious danger to the general populace. Had radioisotopes leaked, THAT would have been a serious danger.
Where did the OP say bomb?? All he talked about was the fear of having to leave ones home without notice never to return... which is pretty horriffic for anyone
Perhaps the OP did mean that he was afraid of an orderly evacuation of the area due to contamination. More likely, (especially given his point about "radiation leaking") he and others were scared that the plant would have effects similar to a bomb. It was quite common at that time (and even today, I'm afraid) to believe that nuclear power plants can produce effects similar to a nuclear weapon. i.e. The two main concerns are that the plant will suffer a nuclear detonation or that the plant will produce a constant stream of radiation that will kill everything in the area.
Now if the OP wishes to correct me and tell me you are correct, that is fine. But in the meantime I must assume he is referring to the perceived effects of a nuclear power plant.
It certainly wasn't good, and it definitely underscored the need for more modern designs in nuclear power plants. However, the plant *did* shut down like it was designed to do. And even if it hadn't, we still wouldn't have had another Chernobyl on our hands. Chernobyl was a poor design that was intentionally compromised for "testing". A very bad situation indeed.
The TMI design was sufficiently different that the materials wouldn't have been able to spread in the way that Chernobyl did. (And Chernobyl has been somewhat overstated, mind you.)
And radiation did leave the plant during the accident.
It's not the radiation you need to worry about. Radiation falls off according to the inverse square law. Unless you were standing next to the plant itself, you weren't in much danger. The *real* problem is the radioisotopes. If they escape the plant (which is what happened in Chernobyl's rather spectacular boiler explosion) they will make their way into the food and water supplies, and - by extension - into our bodies. Those radioisotopes would then proceed to give you cancer from the inside out.
I was a young child then, and I still remember the terror of living within the evacuation area. Nobody knew when they would need to jump in the car and leave their homes behind.
Which is the sad part about the lack of public education on everything nuclear. The plant was not a "bomb" waiting to destroy your neighborhood. Had TMI gone through a spectacular failure, you would have been able to evacuate without too much difficulty. The local resources would have been contaminated, but otherwise you would have been reasonably safe.
Keep in mind that the dozen or so people who died in Chernobyl were people at the plant. All other deaths (which have been greatly exaggerated by the media, mind you) were from radioisotope contamination. Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated. (An impressive feat given the status of the Soviet government at that point.)
Don't get wrong. Nuclear technology can be a scary thing, and people DID die in Chernobyl. Had something worse happened, people might have died from TMI as well. But the amount of FUD surrounding these two incidents has caused massive (perhaps irreparable) damage to the development of safer technologies for controling nuclear power. Technologies, mind you, that could be useful in the next generation of power production. Even Fusion performed without proper safeguards is a very dangerous practice.
French programmers could just develop their software under assumed pen-names
Since we're talking about France, I believe the correct term would be "Nomme de plume". (Literally, "Name of the Feather". It Refers to the use of Feathers as Pens in the days of Ink Quills.)
Considering how much more free the US suddenly seems, I have to say that I'm quite glad that the US put their foot down on the whole "UN owns ICANN" deal.
I said, "He's had an interesting career in SciFi, and got his start in the little known show called Captain Power."
You said, "What about the "The Real Ghost Busters"?"
I suppose you might call Ghost Busters SciFi (though I personally think it leans more towards a fantasy cartoon), but Murder She Wrote definitely isn't. Neither is Jake and the Fatman, no matter how popular that show was.;-)
Ever play with the toys and the toy-related videotapes?
I always wanted the Captain Power ship, but I got stuck with Lord Dread's Interlocker (a blocky VTOL with a huge gun/cockpit for a snout). On the bright side, the Captain Power ships always looked a little difficult to hold.
The cartoons were really only good for the toys, so I got quite good at swinging my toy away from the screen at just the right time. I also managed to hit some of the more difficult shots. (e.g. A tiny sliver of flashing lights.) The toy also worked with the television show, thus explaining why all the bad guys had a flashing chest.
If your score ever reached zero (you started at 5), the cockpit would eject, making a horrible buzzing noise and gracelessly flinging your Captain Power action figure out onto the floor.
Of course, more often than not the character would get stuck in some weird position rather than ejecting. I eventually just popped the character out and played without him.:-)
You have to wonder how many kids had epileptic fits watching those tapes, though!
I've always wondered the same thing. Then again, I've also wondered about players of Yars' Revenge...
He was going to try to get Paramount to accept his ideas for a new Star Trek show (PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, anyone but Beavis & Butthead), but he heard from his contacts that Paramount wanted the show to sit for a while. As a result, he took an offer to run the television show Jeremiah.
He's had an interesting career in SciFi, and got his start in the little known show, "Captain Power and the Soliders of the Future!" Sadly, the show went off the air just as people were starting to get into it. Stupid networks.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad. I was just getting a kick out of misreading the summary:
:-)
The best part is the "biometrics" toilet seat that'll figure out who you are based on your weight and prints
I wonder what prints they're talking about...
Commas (or unintentional lack thereof) are a wonderful thing.
Meebo!
:-)
Yes, I'm well aware of the stale connection hack. (I've mentioned it here before.) However, I wouldn't trust it for something time critical. An IM client or IRC chat room will survive a temporary delay if the connection is lost. A real-time auction OTOH would not be so forgiving. Plus the overhead of the HTTP POST could delay a bid long enough to change the outcome.
Like I said, AJAX doesn't work in the rare situation where the data is both time critical AND requires data to be pushed.
But-but-but...
Uncyclopedia says that PHP is super-secure! I read it online, it must be true!
* Tongue planted firmly in cheek
That's not as big of a problem as you're making it out to be. Some types of Mainframes relied on stateless communications years before the web was invented. As long as you can get the data you need when you need it, the protocol doesn't matter. Granted, AJAX is unsuitable for anything that's time senstive and requires data to be pushed immediately (such as a live auction), but those applications are rare and can always be done with a Java or Flash applet.
Thank you for proving my point. That $99 kit that you linked to has a Spartan 2 XC3S200.
:-)
:-)
:-P
I'm hardly proving your point when you can't even tell the difference between a Spartan 2 and a Spartan 3.
That part has the equivalent of 200,000 gates.
Yep.
Do you really think that you could put an UltraSparc in that little space?
Nope. I was just addressing your point about FPGAs not being for beginners. If your point was intended to be that UltraSPARCs aren't for beginners, then I agree with you.
(Not that it would hurt anything if newbies played with the compiled code in a testing framework a bit. Lotsa stuff you can learn.)
You would want something with a gate count in the millions. And even if you could fit it in there, that part only has 27KB of block ram, so your cache would be quite small. Performace would, in a word, suck.
*shrug* FPGAs are proof of concept devices that work great for development. You've got maybe 100-200 MHz to work with. You can go for some cheap ASICs from Europractice and push it up to ~1GHz. After that, you need to sub-contract a *real* fab.
And when I say hundreds of hours, that includes getting up to speed with the FPGA software, and interfacing the system to other devices. At the very least, you will need an DRAM interface, or some sort of "northbridge" interface to something that can talk to DRAM. And after that, you will need to get an OS running on it in order to really do anything with it. This entire process can take hundreds of hours and will stretch you in hardware and software.
Not everyone is going to be a hardware wizard overnight. But that doesn't mean they can't get a few designs up and running in a minimal amount of time. For example, the Spartan 3 board comes with a well-documented SRAM interface. Perhaps not great for a full UltraSPARC, but you should be able to get a 6502 clone or LEON up and running on it in a short period of time. Xilinx and those at OpenCores have really been making an effort to make it easy for newbies to learn hardware design.
I work with FPGAs for a living, so I know a little about this.
Well I don't work with FPGAs for a living, and I don't know jack. So HAH!
Err... wait a moment...
I doubt that Sun were even suggesting that. My guess is that the Slashdot editors added that.
;-)
The italics are the poster (i.e. me), not the editors. Read this thread for more info.
They read that the 486 only used a few hundred thousand transistors while the P4 uses a few hundred million. And the first thought they have is, "Wow! You could like make a CPU with a thousand 486s on it and have a supercomputer on a chip! Why isn't Intel doing this??? I must post my idea to a newsgroup immediately!". And of course the answer is that in practice the idea sucks. There are minor practical problems like pin count, memory bandwidth, heat dissipation and writing massively parallel code.
Are those the only problems? Pff.
Pin Count - Use the I2C protocol and route the instructions inside the chip.
Memory Bandwidth - I hope you have one hell of a registry file to use as a cache.
Heat - Nothing new here
Massively Parallel Code - How about massive numbers of programs running in parallel?
Seriously, though, the real problem is that people tend not to understand that parallel processing does not equal faster processing. Sure, you can cram 32 execution threads into a single chip (which, BTW, is exactly what the UltraSPARC T1 is), but it's only going to be useful for certain cases. It won't make Quake III run any faster, but it sure as heck will allow a loaded down Web Server strut its stuff in style.
Needless to say, this is not a beginners project by any means. But is it possible for a few hundred dollars and a few hundred hours.
Nonsense! Beginners do it all the time. All you need is $99 to get yourself a Spartan 3 Starter Kit, the free WebPack ISE tools that Xilinx bundles, and a lot of perseverance in learning VHDL, Verilog, JHDL, or some other Hardware Design Language of choice.
As a bonus, the Starter Kit comes with manuals targetted right at newbies to hardware design. It's so easy to understand the hardware layouts of the board that a monkey could do it, and the booklet explaining the history and usage of FGPAs is most informative. Pick up an understanding of Logic Gates from Wikipedia, and you should be ready to get started. (Personally, I think JHDL is the best place to start because it forces you to deal with the actual gates. Once you get that clear in your head VHDL and Verilog become much easier to master.)
Niagara had been released as UltraSPARC T1. UltraSparc T1 is the processor Sun will be releasing as OSS.
Any idea what Schwartz means by this:
Based on a 9.6 Ghz 8-core Niagara chip available in volume
9.6 GHz would rock, but the T2000 only comes in 1.2GHz varieties. Is Schwartz practicing new math or somthing?
Pardon my threadjack, but I just realized that the editors secretly switched my link for a competing brand. Unlike Folgers, I'm afraid it's much cooler to get processor news straight from the horse's mouth.
Excuse me, but I didn't I just say the same thing in the *fine* Summary? As I said, this is "new" because Sun is Open Sourcing one of their top-of-the-line processors instead of a knockoff chip.
And wasn't UltraSPARC one of the platforms OpenBSD was having difficulty porting to?
:-)
As I understand it, the processor was never the problem. The SPARC architecture is well documented and easily obtainable. It was all the other fiddley bits of hardware that have made life difficult for OSS developers.
Believe it or not, I was joking about that. I had a whole post typed up giving a few more specifics and inviting others to comment, but the story failed to appear before I needed to catch the train. :-)
I probably wouldn't have mentioned the FPGA except for the fact that Sun makes a really odd comment on the site about "not knowing an FPGA from an RTL". I'm not quite certain what they're getting at, but it's always possible they're going to have a single core, single thread, cut-down version that CAN fit on an FPGA.
And sometimes, you will be able to find a news that is free on one site, and by subscription on another (eg NYTimes vs CNN).
Which is how Capitalism is supposed to work. I realize that many companies are just looking after their own interests, but they probably don't even realize that they're actually being anti-competitive and that "fair-use" is intended to cover exactly this type of situation.
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but a LOT of American television is being produced out of Canada these days. Personally, that doesn't concern me in the slightest. As long as Canada keeps producing such great shows as Stargate and Red Green, I'll be happy to let them take the lead for all of North America. :-)
Three Words: Red Green Show
Tune into it on PBS sometime and you'll find that there is still some good American humor left, despite what "Airplane" did to the rest of it. Unfortunately, the 'Brits probably won't get it.
As for the Yuvchenko quote: I think you misunderstand me. I have no problem with nuclear power. It's done safely in the US, France and other countries. But I *do* have a problem with people trying to pass off Chernobyl as "no biggie".
In that case, sir, you have misunderstood me. I have never once called Chernobyl "no biggie" or anything to that effect. I called it a tragedy, but highly overstated by the media.
Everything else you have stated has been your personal feelings on the issue, and are not representative of any established facts. I understand your family has gone through tough times, and you have my sympathies. I lost my father to cancer when I was a small child, so I've been there. But to accuse others of inventing facts and demeaning the tragedies because of your own feelings only serves to demean all those who have suffered.
WHOA, WHOA, WHOA. Slow down people! Everyone's automatically assuming that caffine is the key ingredient here. Yet no one has yet made the connection that both Coffee and Black Tea also contain copious quantities of Tannic Acid. Soda pops such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, and RC also share this characteristic. For all we know, they could do a study next week that finds drinking 32oz of Cola per day has the same "health" effect.
From the sound of this article, this was probably a preliminary study. i.e. They surveyed 10,000 people to get their responses, established that some effect was beating the statistical odds, then published their results. From here they will try to get funding to do more thorough studies, and potentially isolate the exact compound responsible for the statistical difference.
*sigh*
These are the real figures from sources other than the Soviet goverment. I'll say again, the death figures have been highly overstated by the media.
Try telling something as stupid and cruel as "Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated" to my grandfather, whose tumorous thyroids were removed earlier this year.
My best wishes to you and your grandfather. I hope his recovery has been swift and as painless as possible.
I realize that you and many others have personal feelings on the issue. What the Soviet government did with Chernobyl was NOT a good thing. Especially to the fire fighters and soldiers who weren't told what the problem was. Or the people allowed to gawk at the pretty lights coming out of the reactor building. Or allowing people to remain long enough to eat and drink from the local resources. Or a million other things the Soviet Union did completely wrong to make the situation worse.
But nothing is gained by overstating the event.
Consider the case of Alexander Yuvchenko. He was in the reactor itself, and suffered FAR worse effects from the event than yourself or your grandfather. Here's what he has to say:
Q: What do you think about nuclear power?
A: I'm fine about it, as long as safety is put head and shoulders above any other concern, financial or whatever. If you keep safety as your number one priority at all stages of planning and running a plant, it should be OK.
Considering what he has been through, he's a truely amazing man.
... so your saying little radiation got out, just radioisotopes? Of course, radioisotopes are not at all radioactive and don't emit any form of dangerous radiation at all do they
You have missed my point, sir. My point was that leaking radiation is not a serious danger to the general populace. Had radioisotopes leaked, THAT would have been a serious danger.
Where did the OP say bomb?? All he talked about was the fear of having to leave ones home without notice never to return... which is pretty horriffic for anyone
Perhaps the OP did mean that he was afraid of an orderly evacuation of the area due to contamination. More likely, (especially given his point about "radiation leaking") he and others were scared that the plant would have effects similar to a bomb. It was quite common at that time (and even today, I'm afraid) to believe that nuclear power plants can produce effects similar to a nuclear weapon. i.e. The two main concerns are that the plant will suffer a nuclear detonation or that the plant will produce a constant stream of radiation that will kill everything in the area.
Now if the OP wishes to correct me and tell me you are correct, that is fine. But in the meantime I must assume he is referring to the perceived effects of a nuclear power plant.
Three Mile Island was nearly catastrophic.
It certainly wasn't good, and it definitely underscored the need for more modern designs in nuclear power plants. However, the plant *did* shut down like it was designed to do. And even if it hadn't, we still wouldn't have had another Chernobyl on our hands. Chernobyl was a poor design that was intentionally compromised for "testing". A very bad situation indeed.
The TMI design was sufficiently different that the materials wouldn't have been able to spread in the way that Chernobyl did. (And Chernobyl has been somewhat overstated, mind you.)
And radiation did leave the plant during the accident.
It's not the radiation you need to worry about. Radiation falls off according to the inverse square law. Unless you were standing next to the plant itself, you weren't in much danger. The *real* problem is the radioisotopes. If they escape the plant (which is what happened in Chernobyl's rather spectacular boiler explosion) they will make their way into the food and water supplies, and - by extension - into our bodies. Those radioisotopes would then proceed to give you cancer from the inside out.
I was a young child then, and I still remember the terror of living within the evacuation area. Nobody knew when they would need to jump in the car and leave their homes behind.
Which is the sad part about the lack of public education on everything nuclear. The plant was not a "bomb" waiting to destroy your neighborhood. Had TMI gone through a spectacular failure, you would have been able to evacuate without too much difficulty. The local resources would have been contaminated, but otherwise you would have been reasonably safe.
Keep in mind that the dozen or so people who died in Chernobyl were people at the plant. All other deaths (which have been greatly exaggerated by the media, mind you) were from radioisotope contamination. Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated. (An impressive feat given the status of the Soviet government at that point.)
Don't get wrong. Nuclear technology can be a scary thing, and people DID die in Chernobyl. Had something worse happened, people might have died from TMI as well. But the amount of FUD surrounding these two incidents has caused massive (perhaps irreparable) damage to the development of safer technologies for controling nuclear power. Technologies, mind you, that could be useful in the next generation of power production. Even Fusion performed without proper safeguards is a very dangerous practice.
French programmers could just develop their software under assumed pen-names
Since we're talking about France, I believe the correct term would be "Nomme de plume". (Literally, "Name of the Feather". It Refers to the use of Feathers as Pens in the days of Ink Quills.)
Considering how much more free the US suddenly seems, I have to say that I'm quite glad that the US put their foot down on the whole "UN owns ICANN" deal.
I said, "He's had an interesting career in SciFi, and got his start in the little known show called Captain Power."
;-)
You said, "What about the "The Real Ghost Busters"?"
I suppose you might call Ghost Busters SciFi (though I personally think it leans more towards a fantasy cartoon), but Murder She Wrote definitely isn't. Neither is Jake and the Fatman, no matter how popular that show was.
Ever play with the toys and the toy-related videotapes?
:-)
I always wanted the Captain Power ship, but I got stuck with Lord Dread's Interlocker (a blocky VTOL with a huge gun/cockpit for a snout). On the bright side, the Captain Power ships always looked a little difficult to hold.
The cartoons were really only good for the toys, so I got quite good at swinging my toy away from the screen at just the right time. I also managed to hit some of the more difficult shots. (e.g. A tiny sliver of flashing lights.) The toy also worked with the television show, thus explaining why all the bad guys had a flashing chest.
If your score ever reached zero (you started at 5), the cockpit would eject, making a horrible buzzing noise and gracelessly flinging your Captain Power action figure out onto the floor.
Of course, more often than not the character would get stuck in some weird position rather than ejecting. I eventually just popped the character out and played without him.
You have to wonder how many kids had epileptic fits watching those tapes, though!
I've always wondered the same thing. Then again, I've also wondered about players of Yars' Revenge...
He was going to try to get Paramount to accept his ideas for a new Star Trek show (PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, anyone but Beavis & Butthead), but he heard from his contacts that Paramount wanted the show to sit for a while. As a result, he took an offer to run the television show Jeremiah.
:-(
He's had an interesting career in SciFi, and got his start in the little known show, "Captain Power and the Soliders of the Future!" Sadly, the show went off the air just as people were starting to get into it. Stupid networks.