Penny Arcade is of the branch of humor that thinks adding swearing to anything will likely make it funnier.
No, not at all. Penny Arcade thinks adding swearing to a serious and relevant discussion will make it funnier. And it does. It works very well in fact. See: George Carlin Standup Comedy.
The jokes DO play to a very small audience. But I am a gamer, much like them, and I do find the jokes funny and the comments relevant. If you think it's lame, fine. But the intended audience doesn't. And thankfully, the small audience is who they care about, rather than trying to water things down and "diversify" their audience like the rest of the corporate world.
A lot of the value in educational games, in my opinion, is to inspire the player to want to know more, rather than to directly teach it to them.
Of course, a little of both never hurts. But most importantly it really has to be a good *game* first and foremost, or no one will play it. The best example I have of this is "Uncharted Waters 2" for the SNES. Teaches you a bit of geography, history, ships, gives you a taste of some of the discoveries that were made back in the 16th century, while also being a damn fun game with plenty of challenge involved (assuming you don't abuse the "assign crew: 100% combat" trick too badly).
It made you want to go and learn about some of this stuff. Or at least, it did for me.
Sodomy laws, marijuana laws, in the states. Man-and-woman marriage laws here in Canada. There is plenty of incentive to change laws when you have a vocal group supporting it.
The problem is, despite all our technical advantages, computer geeks are a loose rabble compared to the well-organized and well-funded gay/lesbian rights groups and legalize pot groups.
They have a single, focused goal, and they are going for it. What do we want? "Freedom". Not very specific, and few really agree on what the hell it means either. If we united all geeks under a "legalize reverse-engineering" banner, perhaps we'd have a better chance, but no one is passionate about that.
Does it work on Firefox? Because I don't recall ever having a dmg automount for me unless I choose to "Open" it using Firefox, rather than "Save to Disk". FWIW, the same distinction applies to executables, which, for me, makes this no different than a typical trojan horse.
I hate cellphones, so I certainly won't be touching one of these. But the gaming side of it doesn't seem all that bad. Why does everyone have such loathing for the thing?
I mean, I thought Sidetalking was *funny*, not a reason to murder Nokia executives in their sleep. The remove-battery-for-game-switching was a mistake, but I fail to see how it makes someone want to boycott all future products with that name. Is it really that offensive? I know that back before I decided cellphones suck, I would've *loved* to have a cellphone built into my Palmpilot, with text message support and a programming interface and all that goodness. Seemed like an obvious enough combination to me. I don't see how a cellphone and a gaming device are that bad a combination either. Cellphone games are quite popular. An attempt to replace "Scrabble" and "Football Champion" with some more top-end titles just doesn't strike me as something that should evoke such hostility and zealotry.... yes, I know. I must be new here.
a 16 megapixel camera is actually only 4 megapixel
That's a ridiculous statement. First of all, my 6.3 megapixel camera outputs images that are perfectly sharp and full of detail right down to the pixel level, at a resolution of 3072 x 2048. How many pixels is that? 6291456. Sounds pretty damn close to 6.3 MP to me.
Your fearmongering about the Bayer pattern (RGBG) interpolation is unjustified. It's not marketing bullshit to have alternating colors (and double green) the way the Bayer pattern does, it's very much intentional. The Bayer pattern is designed to mimic the way our eyes detect light, and for most people, very professional photographers included, it does a superb job. If you are doing serious astronomical work (one of the few places where the interpolation fails to give optimal results, because you don't want to see what the human eye sees, you want to see more) then the Sigma Foveon X3 sensors may be something you're interested in. But other than that, the cones in the eye are not laid out alltogether in little blocks of RGB. If you want to record what a human being would see if standing where you are, there are people who actually prefer Bayer pattern sensors.
even the best real 1920x1080 camera (the Thompson Viper) can take a phot at that res in one 60th of a second exposure at 12 bits of color depth.
That's ridiculous too. The Sigma SD9 and SD10 using Foveon X3 sensors have 3.4 MP, which is significantly more than 1920x1080. And what does exposure length have to do with anything in this discussion? 1/60 sec? Huh?
Wake me up in 20 years when i can finally be impressed.
Don't worry, we'll wake you up when CDs sound better than records, too. Some people just can't get over the fact that we know exactly where the limits of digital technologies are, whereas the limits of analog don't lend themselves to quantification, therefore people assume that they have no limits and are 'perfect'. Just another form of zealotry. I'd prefer to know exactly where my limits are, so I know when I've exceeded them. Helps me avoid situations where I'm asking too much of the camera and have to try something different (multiple exposures, filter, whatever)
he was on crack, and thus, bright and bubbly. The person on the other end was probably stoned and thus paranoid.
Admittedly I know very little about drugs, but I'm pretty sure it would be the other way around. Cocaine makes you paranoid, marijuana makes you relaxed.
Users don't read instructions. It seems to be a primarily computer-based thing. A desk, that seems simple enough, but since they're not exactly sure which piece is for which, they read the instructions. A computer, on the other hand, is black magic. Black magic comes with instructions?
I can't count the number of times I've been doing friendly (read: free) tech support for someone and they ask me to, say, come and get their printer working. So I get there, ask them for the instruction manual, which half the time was in the garbage already. Follow the 5 steps listed on the instructions, everything works perfectly. "What was wrong with it? How'd you fix it?" "I followed the instructions." "Oh. I guess I should've tried that."
About 40 deaths from the initial boiler explosion and later fire fighting. A few thousand cases of Thyroid cancer due to radioactive Iodine and iodine deficiencies in the Russian/Ukrainian diet. Nearly all the cases were treatable, but there were a few deaths and shortened life-spans. Obviously, the quality of life for those with Thyroid cancer has gone down some.
True, but I wasn't talking about the human toll, I'm talking about the large area of land that is no longer suitable for people to live on for a hundred years. What happens when there are only small parcels of land that ARE suitable for people to live on? And these pieces of land were probably *not* hit by nukes because they were not very valuable in the first place.
Doesn't matter. Spreading the material more only weakens its effects. The real damage from a nuclear weapon is its initial explosion and radiation bursts. The remaining radioisotopes are not really significant in themselves.
That's certainly not how I understood it to be. It was my impression that the secondary effects of nuclear detonation were the really dangerous part, that the explosion, while capable of levelling a city, was not nearly as dangerous in terms of overall damage done. I'm not a nuclear physicist either though, so I'll take your word for it.
Maybe you couldn't kill everyone, but you could completely destroy life as we know it. "Post-apocalyptic" is the term generally used for what the earth would look like if everyone started throwing their nukes at each other.
And it's also entirely possible that if enough radiation was splattered around, too many of the surviving people would be rendered sterile, thus ending the human race.
We may not have *that* many nukes, but don't underestimate how many we *do* have. Consider the damage that chernobyl did to the surrounding area. Multiply the 'dead zone' area of chernobyl by the number of nukes that countries publicly admit having, and you'll have a very conservative estimate for the percentage of earth we could make unlivable. I don't have specific numbers but I'd be willing to bet it's at least 100%.
Also, keep in mind that to my knowledge, an airburst thermonuclear explosion has never been attempted. Many of our nuclear warheads are 10,000 to 50,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We really don't know how widespread the destruction from these bombs would be.
I have no experience with Intel parts, as I swore off them long ago (their marketing of the processor ID struck the wrong chord with me), but for AMD:
The fan that comes with the processor is garbage. It may be warranted, but I'm not worried about getting a replacement fan. I *am* worried about keeping the heat and noise levels of my computer to a minimum, and stability to a maximum. The horrifically noisy and weak AMD fans (and their associated undersized heatsinks) may be 'good enough' for people who are used to Windows crashing every couple of days, but it's not good enough for me.
No, I don't overclock. I've been known to underclock, though. That probably voids my warranty as well. Oh well.
But if you think the stock HSF is suitable for everyone (or even most, in my opinion) you're absolutely wrong. Do you void your warranty on your car when you replace the all-season tires with Blizzaks? Why should you need to anyway, those tires that came with your car work fine in all seasons, don't they?
When there's no law, there are market incentives to Do The Right Thing. (If you fail to Do The Right Thing, your customers get pissed off and leave.)
This free-marketeer argument gets trotted out anytime there is a endemic failure within a capitalist market, but it's never quite that simple is it?
Even if it were that simple, the tone of your message says "Oh, whatever, just don't worry about it, stop whining", which is entirely counterproductive.
For the free market to operate properly, people need to care about companies doing bad things. They need to be passionate about it. Every person with a defeatist attitude like that is one more person the companies who do bad things don't have to worry about anymore, who they can abuse at will. When that group of apathetic people reaches critical mass (I'd argue it already did many, many years ago) look out.
Still, all of this assumes that free-market capitalism works as well in practice as it does in theory. That is also up for debate.
Laws are intended to keep the system in check. Neither are perfect, but we make do with what we have.
However, if you leave it charging, you will kill the battery.
Depends on the charger.
Only the most brain-dead of chargers will keep charging until you take the batteries out, at least if they're designed for use with NiMH.
Marginally more intelligent chargers automatically work on a timer that assumes the battery is fully drained, give it a full charge, then stop. These are partially where the 'You should drain all the way before recharging' myth comes from, at least in relation to NiMH.
If you really want to keep your batteries in good condition though, you want to look into a microprocessor-based smart charger, which actually checks the voltage level of the battery to determine when it's topped off. The nicest ones even detect the type of battery based on its charge response curve.
There is no alternative if you want to treat your batteries properly.
Note that none of this applies for Li-Ion, which will readily catch on fire if charged improperly. Li-Ions are always supplied with their own charger, which is without exception a smart charger.
What's wrong with the metaverse? A utopia, perhaps.
Regarding the taking of binary input directly, are you referring to the bitmap/binary scroll that infected people with Snow crash? Hiro never suspected that anyone could read it or understand it directly. It was supposed to be pseudo-magical, somehow tickling the pathways in your brain that had opened due to your understanding of binary. It's part of the fiction.
Besides, there certainly are people who can read binary directly, just as there are people who speak fluent Klingon. Never underestimate the obsessive nature of a geek. Seems popular enough.
But what they're saying is that if I mount a Trojan Horse disk image, it will do bad things to my computer. Explain to me how this is worse than a Trojan horse program? It's possible to write a trojan horse for any platform. Only download software from places you trust.
Canada's first stanley cup game in 9 years, Calgary's first in 15. Besides, who doesn't like to root for the underdog (and Calgary was certainly the underdog all the way through the playoffs, and will continue to be in the Stanley Cup series)
Seriously, this article is all about playing with a new destructive toy and not much about using the toy in question to do interesting science-related experiments.... you say that like it's a bad thing?
You can own an apartment, too. They call it a 'condo', and they tend to appreciate in value quite well as long as the building itself is well maintained.
Keep in mind that denser living is not a blanket solution. In many ways, it is terribly limiting. For example, I cannot practise my trumpet at home for fear of bothering my neighbors. I am always concerned about how high my home theater's subwoofer is turned up. I don't have a garage or driveway in which to do woodworking/welding. I certainly cannot have a band practise at my place.
With that said, I do live downtown, I do ride my bike anywhere I need to go, so it's certainly a valid way of doing things. But there are sacrifices involved. If I had a family, I couldn't get my groceries this way, there would just be way too much stuff. I think that a Safeway/other grocery store should be a basic service, like a laundromat, that is at least within a block of any given apartment building if not right inside. That would at least solve that problem.
A bicycle is an alternative to a car, but it's not easy... yet. And I doubt it will become so until more people, like you, start to realize just how awful cars are and start demanding change. It's something city planners need to look very carefully. Believe it or not, "How can we make the city accessible to bikes?" and "How can we get people to stop needing cars?" potentially have very different answers.
That difference, combined with a solid containment, was the chief difference between the Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl accidents.
While I mostly agree with your post, I don't think that particular comment is exactly true. While there's no arguing that the positive void coefficient was a prerequisite for the chernobyl disaster, Three Mile Island was something quite different. The TMI disaster happened with the control rods fully in. The reactor core was basically idling, and the failure was mainly poor design and monitoring of the cooling system, which spent a good long time spraying radioactive coolant out of a pressure release valve. With all the control rods in, very little of the energy is being produced by nuclear chain reactions, so positive void coefficient does not play a significant role.
Then again, I am not a nuclear physicist or technician, so I may very well be full of shit.
Nope. My mail server knows exactly where the connection is coming from.
Received: from pcp02167297pcs.hatisb01.ms.comcast.net (pcp02167297pcs.hatisb01.ms.comcast.net [68.63.230.164])
by poison.ous.ca (Postfix on SuSE Linux 7.2 (i386)) with SMTP id 2A3275655BB
for <cecil-raven@iambitter.org>; Tue, 18 May 2004 18:06:55 +0000 (Canada/Mountain)
Please keep in mind that the site that the OP linked to purports to be providing blacklists for ALL ASIAN IPs, not just open relays. I cannot verify if they actually mean (and are) listing just open relays, but that is not what they are claiming. That is the part that bothers me.
Banning open relays is also stupid, in my opinion, but not for the same reasons, so I'm going to let that go...
Slashdot Mirror
Penny Arcade is of the branch of humor that thinks adding swearing to anything will likely make it funnier.
No, not at all. Penny Arcade thinks adding swearing to a serious and relevant discussion will make it funnier. And it does. It works very well in fact. See: George Carlin Standup Comedy.
The jokes DO play to a very small audience. But I am a gamer, much like them, and I do find the jokes funny and the comments relevant. If you think it's lame, fine. But the intended audience doesn't. And thankfully, the small audience is who they care about, rather than trying to water things down and "diversify" their audience like the rest of the corporate world.
A lot of the value in educational games, in my opinion, is to inspire the player to want to know more, rather than to directly teach it to them.
Of course, a little of both never hurts. But most importantly it really has to be a good *game* first and foremost, or no one will play it. The best example I have of this is "Uncharted Waters 2" for the SNES. Teaches you a bit of geography, history, ships, gives you a taste of some of the discoveries that were made back in the 16th century, while also being a damn fun game with plenty of challenge involved (assuming you don't abuse the "assign crew: 100% combat" trick too badly).
It made you want to go and learn about some of this stuff. Or at least, it did for me.
Sodomy laws, marijuana laws, in the states. Man-and-woman marriage laws here in Canada. There is plenty of incentive to change laws when you have a vocal group supporting it.
The problem is, despite all our technical advantages, computer geeks are a loose rabble compared to the well-organized and well-funded gay/lesbian rights groups and legalize pot groups.
They have a single, focused goal, and they are going for it. What do we want? "Freedom". Not very specific, and few really agree on what the hell it means either. If we united all geeks under a "legalize reverse-engineering" banner, perhaps we'd have a better chance, but no one is passionate about that.
Ironically, the best CRPG I've ever played, seems to be more popular on the X-Box. (Morrowind)
Thanks for the information.
Does it work on Firefox? Because I don't recall ever having a dmg automount for me unless I choose to "Open" it using Firefox, rather than "Save to Disk". FWIW, the same distinction applies to executables, which, for me, makes this no different than a typical trojan horse.
I hate cellphones, so I certainly won't be touching one of these. But the gaming side of it doesn't seem all that bad. Why does everyone have such loathing for the thing?
... yes, I know. I must be new here.
I mean, I thought Sidetalking was *funny*, not a reason to murder Nokia executives in their sleep. The remove-battery-for-game-switching was a mistake, but I fail to see how it makes someone want to boycott all future products with that name. Is it really that offensive? I know that back before I decided cellphones suck, I would've *loved* to have a cellphone built into my Palmpilot, with text message support and a programming interface and all that goodness. Seemed like an obvious enough combination to me. I don't see how a cellphone and a gaming device are that bad a combination either. Cellphone games are quite popular. An attempt to replace "Scrabble" and "Football Champion" with some more top-end titles just doesn't strike me as something that should evoke such hostility and zealotry.
a 16 megapixel camera is actually only 4 megapixel
That's a ridiculous statement. First of all, my 6.3 megapixel camera outputs images that are perfectly sharp and full of detail right down to the pixel level, at a resolution of 3072 x 2048. How many pixels is that? 6291456. Sounds pretty damn close to 6.3 MP to me.
Your fearmongering about the Bayer pattern (RGBG) interpolation is unjustified. It's not marketing bullshit to have alternating colors (and double green) the way the Bayer pattern does, it's very much intentional. The Bayer pattern is designed to mimic the way our eyes detect light, and for most people, very professional photographers included, it does a superb job. If you are doing serious astronomical work (one of the few places where the interpolation fails to give optimal results, because you don't want to see what the human eye sees, you want to see more) then the Sigma Foveon X3 sensors may be something you're interested in. But other than that, the cones in the eye are not laid out alltogether in little blocks of RGB. If you want to record what a human being would see if standing where you are, there are people who actually prefer Bayer pattern sensors.
even the best real 1920x1080 camera (the Thompson Viper) can take a phot at that res in one 60th of a second exposure at 12 bits of color depth.
That's ridiculous too. The Sigma SD9 and SD10 using Foveon X3 sensors have 3.4 MP, which is significantly more than 1920x1080. And what does exposure length have to do with anything in this discussion? 1/60 sec? Huh?
Wake me up in 20 years when i can finally be impressed.
Don't worry, we'll wake you up when CDs sound better than records, too. Some people just can't get over the fact that we know exactly where the limits of digital technologies are, whereas the limits of analog don't lend themselves to quantification, therefore people assume that they have no limits and are 'perfect'. Just another form of zealotry. I'd prefer to know exactly where my limits are, so I know when I've exceeded them. Helps me avoid situations where I'm asking too much of the camera and have to try something different (multiple exposures, filter, whatever)
he was on crack, and thus, bright and bubbly. The person on the other end was probably stoned and thus paranoid.
Admittedly I know very little about drugs, but I'm pretty sure it would be the other way around. Cocaine makes you paranoid, marijuana makes you relaxed.
Users don't read instructions. It seems to be a primarily computer-based thing. A desk, that seems simple enough, but since they're not exactly sure which piece is for which, they read the instructions. A computer, on the other hand, is black magic. Black magic comes with instructions?
I can't count the number of times I've been doing friendly (read: free) tech support for someone and they ask me to, say, come and get their printer working. So I get there, ask them for the instruction manual, which half the time was in the garbage already. Follow the 5 steps listed on the instructions, everything works perfectly. "What was wrong with it? How'd you fix it?" "I followed the instructions." "Oh. I guess I should've tried that."
About 40 deaths from the initial boiler explosion and later fire fighting. A few thousand cases of Thyroid cancer due to radioactive Iodine and iodine deficiencies in the Russian/Ukrainian diet. Nearly all the cases were treatable, but there were a few deaths and shortened life-spans. Obviously, the quality of life for those with Thyroid cancer has gone down some.
:)
True, but I wasn't talking about the human toll, I'm talking about the large area of land that is no longer suitable for people to live on for a hundred years. What happens when there are only small parcels of land that ARE suitable for people to live on? And these pieces of land were probably *not* hit by nukes because they were not very valuable in the first place.
Doesn't matter. Spreading the material more only weakens its effects. The real damage from a nuclear weapon is its initial explosion and radiation bursts. The remaining radioisotopes are not really significant in themselves.
That's certainly not how I understood it to be. It was my impression that the secondary effects of nuclear detonation were the really dangerous part, that the explosion, while capable of levelling a city, was not nearly as dangerous in terms of overall damage done. I'm not a nuclear physicist either though, so I'll take your word for it.
Thanks for the discussion.
Maybe you couldn't kill everyone, but you could completely destroy life as we know it. "Post-apocalyptic" is the term generally used for what the earth would look like if everyone started throwing their nukes at each other.
And it's also entirely possible that if enough radiation was splattered around, too many of the surviving people would be rendered sterile, thus ending the human race.
We may not have *that* many nukes, but don't underestimate how many we *do* have. Consider the damage that chernobyl did to the surrounding area. Multiply the 'dead zone' area of chernobyl by the number of nukes that countries publicly admit having, and you'll have a very conservative estimate for the percentage of earth we could make unlivable. I don't have specific numbers but I'd be willing to bet it's at least 100%.
Also, keep in mind that to my knowledge, an airburst thermonuclear explosion has never been attempted. Many of our nuclear warheads are 10,000 to 50,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We really don't know how widespread the destruction from these bombs would be.
I have no experience with Intel parts, as I swore off them long ago (their marketing of the processor ID struck the wrong chord with me), but for AMD:
The fan that comes with the processor is garbage. It may be warranted, but I'm not worried about getting a replacement fan. I *am* worried about keeping the heat and noise levels of my computer to a minimum, and stability to a maximum. The horrifically noisy and weak AMD fans (and their associated undersized heatsinks) may be 'good enough' for people who are used to Windows crashing every couple of days, but it's not good enough for me.
No, I don't overclock. I've been known to underclock, though. That probably voids my warranty as well. Oh well.
But if you think the stock HSF is suitable for everyone (or even most, in my opinion) you're absolutely wrong. Do you void your warranty on your car when you replace the all-season tires with Blizzaks? Why should you need to anyway, those tires that came with your car work fine in all seasons, don't they?
When there's no law, there are market incentives to Do The Right Thing. (If you fail to Do The Right Thing, your customers get pissed off and leave.)
This free-marketeer argument gets trotted out anytime there is a endemic failure within a capitalist market, but it's never quite that simple is it?
Even if it were that simple, the tone of your message says "Oh, whatever, just don't worry about it, stop whining", which is entirely counterproductive.
For the free market to operate properly, people need to care about companies doing bad things. They need to be passionate about it. Every person with a defeatist attitude like that is one more person the companies who do bad things don't have to worry about anymore, who they can abuse at will. When that group of apathetic people reaches critical mass (I'd argue it already did many, many years ago) look out.
Still, all of this assumes that free-market capitalism works as well in practice as it does in theory. That is also up for debate.
Laws are intended to keep the system in check. Neither are perfect, but we make do with what we have.
*grin* How some of these people get jobs in ad-copy writing I'll never know.
Actually, that goes for any job field. Far too many ignorant people in the world.
However, if you leave it charging, you will kill the battery.
Depends on the charger.
Only the most brain-dead of chargers will keep charging until you take the batteries out, at least if they're designed for use with NiMH.
Marginally more intelligent chargers automatically work on a timer that assumes the battery is fully drained, give it a full charge, then stop. These are partially where the 'You should drain all the way before recharging' myth comes from, at least in relation to NiMH.
If you really want to keep your batteries in good condition though, you want to look into a microprocessor-based smart charger, which actually checks the voltage level of the battery to determine when it's topped off. The nicest ones even detect the type of battery based on its charge response curve.
There is no alternative if you want to treat your batteries properly.
Note that none of this applies for Li-Ion, which will readily catch on fire if charged improperly. Li-Ions are always supplied with their own charger, which is without exception a smart charger.
What's wrong with the metaverse? A utopia, perhaps.
Regarding the taking of binary input directly, are you referring to the bitmap/binary scroll that infected people with Snow crash? Hiro never suspected that anyone could read it or understand it directly. It was supposed to be pseudo-magical, somehow tickling the pathways in your brain that had opened due to your understanding of binary. It's part of the fiction.
Besides, there certainly are people who can read binary directly, just as there are people who speak fluent Klingon. Never underestimate the obsessive nature of a geek. Seems popular enough.
But what they're saying is that if I mount a Trojan Horse disk image, it will do bad things to my computer. Explain to me how this is worse than a Trojan horse program? It's possible to write a trojan horse for any platform. Only download software from places you trust.
Canada's first stanley cup game in 9 years, Calgary's first in 15. Besides, who doesn't like to root for the underdog (and Calgary was certainly the underdog all the way through the playoffs, and will continue to be in the Stanley Cup series)
:)
Besides, I am a Calgarian. GO FLAMES GO!
Seriously, this article is all about playing with a new destructive toy and not much about using the toy in question to do interesting science-related experiments. ... you say that like it's a bad thing?
You know what would be great? If my grocery store had a local farmers market in it!
(+1 Funny, I know, but I'm actually being serious too)
You can own an apartment, too. They call it a 'condo', and they tend to appreciate in value quite well as long as the building itself is well maintained.
Keep in mind that denser living is not a blanket solution. In many ways, it is terribly limiting. For example, I cannot practise my trumpet at home for fear of bothering my neighbors. I am always concerned about how high my home theater's subwoofer is turned up. I don't have a garage or driveway in which to do woodworking/welding. I certainly cannot have a band practise at my place.
With that said, I do live downtown, I do ride my bike anywhere I need to go, so it's certainly a valid way of doing things. But there are sacrifices involved. If I had a family, I couldn't get my groceries this way, there would just be way too much stuff. I think that a Safeway/other grocery store should be a basic service, like a laundromat, that is at least within a block of any given apartment building if not right inside. That would at least solve that problem.
A bicycle is an alternative to a car, but it's not easy... yet. And I doubt it will become so until more people, like you, start to realize just how awful cars are and start demanding change. It's something city planners need to look very carefully. Believe it or not, "How can we make the city accessible to bikes?" and "How can we get people to stop needing cars?" potentially have very different answers.
That difference, combined with a solid containment, was the chief difference between the Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl accidents.
While I mostly agree with your post, I don't think that particular comment is exactly true. While there's no arguing that the positive void coefficient was a prerequisite for the chernobyl disaster, Three Mile Island was something quite different. The TMI disaster happened with the control rods fully in. The reactor core was basically idling, and the failure was mainly poor design and monitoring of the cooling system, which spent a good long time spraying radioactive coolant out of a pressure release valve. With all the control rods in, very little of the energy is being produced by nuclear chain reactions, so positive void coefficient does not play a significant role.
Then again, I am not a nuclear physicist or technician, so I may very well be full of shit.
Nope. My mail server knows exactly where the connection is coming from.
Received: from pcp02167297pcs.hatisb01.ms.comcast.net (pcp02167297pcs.hatisb01.ms.comcast.net [68.63.230.164])
by poison.ous.ca (Postfix on SuSE Linux 7.2 (i386)) with SMTP id 2A3275655BB
for <cecil-raven@iambitter.org>; Tue, 18 May 2004 18:06:55 +0000 (Canada/Mountain)
Please keep in mind that the site that the OP linked to purports to be providing blacklists for ALL ASIAN IPs, not just open relays. I cannot verify if they actually mean (and are) listing just open relays, but that is not what they are claiming. That is the part that bothers me.
Banning open relays is also stupid, in my opinion, but not for the same reasons, so I'm going to let that go...