Second reply, bad form, sorry. The ads are tolerable - they're up in a corner and don't interfere with the game too much. I've actually clicked a few of them deliberately, and even bought advertised apps. But now they're pushing my limits with the Bing cheats ads, and Bing in general, and video ads before the game starts. If they don't cut that out I'm going to have to uninstall the thing even though I like it otherwise even if there's no for-pay version yet.
The value of a free thing trends toward zero. I hope they offer me the for-pay version soon, but I doubt it.
There will be more lessons soon from Rovio about how to build and destroy immense value in the shortest possible cycle. But I didn't put that because the grandparent was looking for how to initiate the upstroke, not how to prevent the downstroke. If you do the upstroke cycle and buy the Ferrari for cash and are otherwise fiscally prudent, then after the downstroke you get to keep most of the stuff you got, including the Ferrari even after you can't afford to put gas in it. If you lease, not so much. It's possible to avoid the downstroke but it's like threading a needle. Rovio isn't threading this needle. They're riding the tiger instead. In that story the tiger wins.
Take your lessons from the leader in the field. You don't need it pirated, you need to give it away - sort of. You also need to work the buyer a little.
The lite version of Angry Birds with 15 levels is a cute introduction to the game that rewards the downloader for the trial by providing a few hours of entertainment. Sound is used throughout to influence the player. The play control is simple, which hides some complexity that lets the player think he's smart for figuring out the puzzle. Progress is incremental - you have to defeat a level before you go on, which rewards the user with frustration - this is good to a point, but they have to be well onto the hook before you pull them forward with frustration so the first few levels have to be fairly easy - but not pathetically so. Lessons: Hook 'em with a freebie that starts easy and gets harder fast, but doesn't turn impossible. The global competitiveness thing with top scores is trite. It's overdone. Avoid it.
The game is a moral play and the player is cast as the good guy destroying the evil pigs that steal the eggs. Even my 2 year old grandson gets this. Every world starts with a cartoon video that tells a story, each level starts with an intro that builds suspense. Do pigs really steal eggs? No. But that's the premise built by the opening animation that we consent to when we play the game. Idling is nefarious pig grunting to encourage play, and play includes enthusiastic bird charging sounds. It starts easy, with one star for each level, but is very difficult at three stars each level. Each time you beat a level you get an audio reward (birds crowing and a little instrumental piece) - and a trumpet for a new high score for the level. And when you don't beat it, a punishment - pigs laughing and grunting. You can get in and out very quickly and without too much loss (you can try a level in 30 seconds or so). Quicker is better. For the cheaters there are YouTube walkthroughs. It has no ads. This is the beta they used to get people into the game and its main screen includes a link to the market where you can buy the full version now that there is one. Lessons: Tell a story. Work the user emotionally with audio, give a lot of entertainment in the beta and it'll go viral and get you lots of beta testers and the feedback you need to perfect your game. It wouldn't kill you to post the first few YouTube walkthroughs for the cheaters yourself under a nym. Cheaters think they're clever for resourcing YouTube, and they're only hurting themselves. Reward them even for just running the app, with a happy greeting. Cast the player as the good guy in a moral play.
It's a great intro to the ad-supported full version. In fact, it's such a good intro that they've now a non-beta "seasons" freebie game that has more levels that is ad supported, that gets updated every major holiday with even more levels. Lessons: free spinoffs amplify the viral nature of the freebie and can be a good little earner all by itself. Save this for after the game itself is profitable.
For the full version that's ad-supported there are far more levels of course, and more all the time. Naturally there would be, or your customers would stop viewing ads when they completed the game. The full, no-ad version isn't supported on my phone yet (Android) and I suspect that's because they're making so much money on the ads. Lessons: if the ad-based game goes viral you can hire some cheap level designers to generate more content as time goes on - and you should to keep the money rolling in. And that pays for improving the value of the for-pay game as well.
The for-pay game includes an additional cheat: the Mighty Eagle, that you have to buy in-game to use. I don't get this option on Android yet I don't think, not that I'm the cheating kind. In-game purchases are the sort of thing you probably shouldn't think about right off. But the for-pay game is ridiculously cheap: 99c on iOS. That makes it so cheap that people don't even think about buying it, and d
Oh, yeah. They're doing GREAT. Except for the whole emitting toxic radiation that could kill you in one hour thing, And the whole completely having lost control of six nuclear power plants full of fissibles thing. Other than that, good job.
You're completely wrong on this one. It's been 40 years. The people who built it, the people who hired them, the engineers who signed the plans, the executives that organized and paid for it - all have retired by now. Unless they live in Tokyo, they are not affected. They got theirs and got away clean.
The "containment breach" discussed here is an escapement of steam from the core to the atmosphere. Through the steel core. Through the concrete core. And into the air around the plant. The steam contains radioactive materials, but at the moment that's the least of their problems. Given time and enough pumping of boric acid laced seawater, they can get cores 1-3 to cold shutdown. The problem is they may not have the time if the "spent fuel" pond on top of reactor 4, which contains not spent fuel but active fuel removed for maintenance reaches criticality. Given the lag in reportage, this may have already happened, or will happen soon. In that event all bets are off.
Look again. The fuel stored on the roof of reactor 4 is not "spent". It's the active fuel taken out of the reactor last November when it was taken offline for maintenance.
For those unfamiliar with the sievert unit used here, this is 1,000 millisieverts, or one sievert per hour. 20 millisieverts, or just over one minute exposure to this level of radiation in a year is the average exposure limit for nuclear workers. 100 millisieverts in a year, or six minutes worth of this exposure level, increases your risk of cancer measureably. 1000 millisieverts = 1 sievert or one hour's worth makes you puke (nausea and other immediate health effects). 2 sieverts and your hair falls out, but you'll probably live. 5 sieverts is LD 50 for otherwise healthy people (Lethal Dose, 50%, or half of the population exposed at this level die shortly thereafter). 10 sieverts in an incident, or 10 hours working under these conditions, is always fatal within a few days. In the surroundings of the Chernobyl incident immediately after the accident, exposure levels were 10-300 sieverts per hour. For people more accustomed to the rem unit of measure, 1 sievert = 100 rem.
Typically the units of measure for nuclear plant radioactivity are given in microsieverts per hour and the transition from microsieverts to millisieverts has caused considerable confusion in the press. But in this report the unit is definitely 1,000 millisieverts, or one sievert, per hour. They did not evacuate the workers at 100,000 microsieverts per hour.
We don't deal with this much, but it's ingrained into these plant workers to precisely measure, to understand exposures and risks. At this point it's likely they will all die in the coming weeks from radiation exposure, and they know it. But they're fighting the good fight anyway. We will thank them for their sacrifice later, posthumously.
What I'm reading is that the biggest concern isn't reactors two and three that were active at the time of the tsunami and appear now to be breaching containment and venting mildly radioactive steam. It's reactor four, which holds no fissibles in its containment. Its fissibles were put on the roof in the spent fuel pond for maintenance last November. Since then of course, the pond appears to have been damaged - perhaps in the hydrogen explosion that blew the roof off, but more likely in the quake. Regardless, the heat from this non-spent reactor fuel is supposed to be dissipated by cooling which is not now operating, the pond is boiling off - possibly leaking as well, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get boron-laced seawater into this cooling pond to restart the cooling and prevent a meltdown in the open air.
After some time on the roof exposed to air, it's possible this fuel would melt down to the bottom of the pond. In that case, in the precise words of the utility, "The possibility of re-criticality is not zero.'' A criticality accident is when a bunch of fissibles reaches critical mass. Contrary to what you might think, this does not cause a nuclear explosion. It is, however, a Big Deal.
This still isn't as bad as Chernobyl. At Chernobyl in addition to this they had carbon rods that would burn - and they did, explosively - sending something like 10% of the fissibles high into the air. As you probably know, in that incident between 15,000 and 30,000 people died and over two million saw health effects.
Now the hole in the roof isn't directly over the pond. The pond needs some water and boric acid solution. It's boiling off radioactive steam and hydrogen and oxygen, so flying a helicopter in and doing the needful thing is a one way trip uncertain of success. We need a hero - probably several. Somebody to blow the rest of the roof off with a missile, and some other bodies have to fly suicide missions into the hole to drop the nuclear retardant. And it has to happen soon.
If somebody doesn't get in there and stop this then attempted operations in the area won't just be suicidal - they'll be pointless, as the radiation will become immediately fatal before the heroes can do their work to cool the other reactors and their "spent" fuel ponds. Oh, and the ponds on top of reactors five and six are heating up now, reactors 1, 2 and 3 still have issues to deal with. Not a good day to be in Tokyo. Fortunately the winds are offshore today.
Geothermal is a good answer for Japan. It's clean, it's cheap, and it'll never run out. It costs a little more up front than nuclear, but if you ask the people in Tokyo today if they would prefer it they might buy in.
Fission must remain a useful source of power regardless of this disaster. Fission still happens whether the electorate wills it or not. Ultimately the sun's fission is where we get all our power from, even if it's been stored as fossil fuels for millions of years. All power is nuclear power.
These plants from 40 years ago are relics of the best of their time, but their day is done. That's a pretty big deal because Japan has lots of nuclear plants from this era. The change will shift monies from one pocket to another.
As I said in some other posts, two are known dead. Five reactors at two plants may be losing containment. You can see the explosion at 1:22 in this video. That's the outer containment being blown off a nuclear reactor, so if the inner steel containment is breached, the worst will happen. And it looks like that's going to happen, though it's not reported to have happened yet.
There's a time for blame assessment, for dispassionate analysis of the costs and benefits, for discussion of how modern technologies are better than the technologies afforded these plants from the dark ages of fission. Today is not that time. Today is for expressing regret for the loss of life, the pain and suffering of those affected, to rally what support we may. Today would be a good day to express hope that all five reactors don't go up.
Also, some backup planning would be good. Prevailing winds and ocean currents take the output from this particular location in Japan past Hawaii and then curve back for another tour of Southeast Asia. On a bad day for the US though, the winds and currents tend a bit further north, and deposit their gifts on the West coast of the US, falling as rain in the Sierra Nevada range and the Rockies. If you're downwind of this thing now would be a good time to review your knowledge of the physical effects of radiation exposure. On a bad day I'm downwind from this thing and that matters to me personally, no matter what my opinion of nuclear energy is. Generally I'm for it, but today would be a bad day to hit me up for support for it because this event could, in the worst case, decrease the lifespan of my children.
Now, do you really want to argue about this here and now, or maybe wait a bit and see if the worst case didn't happen?
Nuclear power may be completely safe if done correctly. Near the shore of an island formed by volcanic activity may not be the correct place. That may be a better place for geothermal power. But I haven't got the heart for the argument today. Today my heart goes out to the families of the lost, to those suffering now, and to those who may be soon.
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Second reply, bad form, sorry. The ads are tolerable - they're up in a corner and don't interfere with the game too much. I've actually clicked a few of them deliberately, and even bought advertised apps. But now they're pushing my limits with the Bing cheats ads, and Bing in general, and video ads before the game starts. If they don't cut that out I'm going to have to uninstall the thing even though I like it otherwise even if there's no for-pay version yet.
The value of a free thing trends toward zero. I hope they offer me the for-pay version soon, but I doubt it.
There will be more lessons soon from Rovio about how to build and destroy immense value in the shortest possible cycle. But I didn't put that because the grandparent was looking for how to initiate the upstroke, not how to prevent the downstroke. If you do the upstroke cycle and buy the Ferrari for cash and are otherwise fiscally prudent, then after the downstroke you get to keep most of the stuff you got, including the Ferrari even after you can't afford to put gas in it. If you lease, not so much. It's possible to avoid the downstroke but it's like threading a needle. Rovio isn't threading this needle. They're riding the tiger instead. In that story the tiger wins.
We have been asking for the for-pay verson for a long time. It is now promised, but they have their hands full. I would pay for it.
Take your lessons from the leader in the field. You don't need it pirated, you need to give it away - sort of. You also need to work the buyer a little.
The lite version of Angry Birds with 15 levels is a cute introduction to the game that rewards the downloader for the trial by providing a few hours of entertainment. Sound is used throughout to influence the player. The play control is simple, which hides some complexity that lets the player think he's smart for figuring out the puzzle. Progress is incremental - you have to defeat a level before you go on, which rewards the user with frustration - this is good to a point, but they have to be well onto the hook before you pull them forward with frustration so the first few levels have to be fairly easy - but not pathetically so. Lessons: Hook 'em with a freebie that starts easy and gets harder fast, but doesn't turn impossible. The global competitiveness thing with top scores is trite. It's overdone. Avoid it.
The game is a moral play and the player is cast as the good guy destroying the evil pigs that steal the eggs. Even my 2 year old grandson gets this. Every world starts with a cartoon video that tells a story, each level starts with an intro that builds suspense. Do pigs really steal eggs? No. But that's the premise built by the opening animation that we consent to when we play the game. Idling is nefarious pig grunting to encourage play, and play includes enthusiastic bird charging sounds. It starts easy, with one star for each level, but is very difficult at three stars each level. Each time you beat a level you get an audio reward (birds crowing and a little instrumental piece) - and a trumpet for a new high score for the level. And when you don't beat it, a punishment - pigs laughing and grunting. You can get in and out very quickly and without too much loss (you can try a level in 30 seconds or so). Quicker is better. For the cheaters there are YouTube walkthroughs. It has no ads. This is the beta they used to get people into the game and its main screen includes a link to the market where you can buy the full version now that there is one. Lessons: Tell a story. Work the user emotionally with audio, give a lot of entertainment in the beta and it'll go viral and get you lots of beta testers and the feedback you need to perfect your game. It wouldn't kill you to post the first few YouTube walkthroughs for the cheaters yourself under a nym. Cheaters think they're clever for resourcing YouTube, and they're only hurting themselves. Reward them even for just running the app, with a happy greeting. Cast the player as the good guy in a moral play.
It's a great intro to the ad-supported full version. In fact, it's such a good intro that they've now a non-beta "seasons" freebie game that has more levels that is ad supported, that gets updated every major holiday with even more levels. Lessons: free spinoffs amplify the viral nature of the freebie and can be a good little earner all by itself. Save this for after the game itself is profitable.
For the full version that's ad-supported there are far more levels of course, and more all the time. Naturally there would be, or your customers would stop viewing ads when they completed the game. The full, no-ad version isn't supported on my phone yet (Android) and I suspect that's because they're making so much money on the ads. Lessons: if the ad-based game goes viral you can hire some cheap level designers to generate more content as time goes on - and you should to keep the money rolling in. And that pays for improving the value of the for-pay game as well.
The for-pay game includes an additional cheat: the Mighty Eagle, that you have to buy in-game to use. I don't get this option on Android yet I don't think, not that I'm the cheating kind. In-game purchases are the sort of thing you probably shouldn't think about right off. But the for-pay game is ridiculously cheap: 99c on iOS. That makes it so cheap that people don't even think about buying it, and d
Have you even Heard of geothermal? Apparently, Japan is magma-rich.
Oh, yeah. They're doing GREAT. Except for the whole emitting toxic radiation that could kill you in one hour thing, And the whole completely having lost control of six nuclear power plants full of fissibles thing. Other than that, good job.
We're not underwriting insurance policies. We're driving our kids to school in the minivan.
geo thermal. Look it up.
You're completely wrong on this one. It's been 40 years. The people who built it, the people who hired them, the engineers who signed the plans, the executives that organized and paid for it - all have retired by now. Unless they live in Tokyo, they are not affected. They got theirs and got away clean.
Madness? That would be remaining in your burning house too consumed with political argument to save yourself and your family.
The "containment breach" discussed here is an escapement of steam from the core to the atmosphere. Through the steel core. Through the concrete core. And into the air around the plant. The steam contains radioactive materials, but at the moment that's the least of their problems. Given time and enough pumping of boric acid laced seawater, they can get cores 1-3 to cold shutdown. The problem is they may not have the time if the "spent fuel" pond on top of reactor 4, which contains not spent fuel but active fuel removed for maintenance reaches criticality. Given the lag in reportage, this may have already happened, or will happen soon. In that event all bets are off.
Look again. The fuel stored on the roof of reactor 4 is not "spent". It's the active fuel taken out of the reactor last November when it was taken offline for maintenance.
For those unfamiliar with the sievert unit used here, this is 1,000 millisieverts, or one sievert per hour. 20 millisieverts, or just over one minute exposure to this level of radiation in a year is the average exposure limit for nuclear workers. 100 millisieverts in a year, or six minutes worth of this exposure level, increases your risk of cancer measureably. 1000 millisieverts = 1 sievert or one hour's worth makes you puke (nausea and other immediate health effects). 2 sieverts and your hair falls out, but you'll probably live. 5 sieverts is LD 50 for otherwise healthy people (Lethal Dose, 50%, or half of the population exposed at this level die shortly thereafter). 10 sieverts in an incident, or 10 hours working under these conditions, is always fatal within a few days. In the surroundings of the Chernobyl incident immediately after the accident, exposure levels were 10-300 sieverts per hour. For people more accustomed to the rem unit of measure, 1 sievert = 100 rem.
Typically the units of measure for nuclear plant radioactivity are given in microsieverts per hour and the transition from microsieverts to millisieverts has caused considerable confusion in the press. But in this report the unit is definitely 1,000 millisieverts, or one sievert, per hour. They did not evacuate the workers at 100,000 microsieverts per hour.
We don't deal with this much, but it's ingrained into these plant workers to precisely measure, to understand exposures and risks. At this point it's likely they will all die in the coming weeks from radiation exposure, and they know it. But they're fighting the good fight anyway. We will thank them for their sacrifice later, posthumously.
What I'm reading is that the biggest concern isn't reactors two and three that were active at the time of the tsunami and appear now to be breaching containment and venting mildly radioactive steam. It's reactor four, which holds no fissibles in its containment. Its fissibles were put on the roof in the spent fuel pond for maintenance last November. Since then of course, the pond appears to have been damaged - perhaps in the hydrogen explosion that blew the roof off, but more likely in the quake. Regardless, the heat from this non-spent reactor fuel is supposed to be dissipated by cooling which is not now operating, the pond is boiling off - possibly leaking as well, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get boron-laced seawater into this cooling pond to restart the cooling and prevent a meltdown in the open air.
After some time on the roof exposed to air, it's possible this fuel would melt down to the bottom of the pond. In that case, in the precise words of the utility, "The possibility of re-criticality is not zero.'' A criticality accident is when a bunch of fissibles reaches critical mass. Contrary to what you might think, this does not cause a nuclear explosion. It is, however, a Big Deal.
This still isn't as bad as Chernobyl. At Chernobyl in addition to this they had carbon rods that would burn - and they did, explosively - sending something like 10% of the fissibles high into the air. As you probably know, in that incident between 15,000 and 30,000 people died and over two million saw health effects.
Now the hole in the roof isn't directly over the pond. The pond needs some water and boric acid solution. It's boiling off radioactive steam and hydrogen and oxygen, so flying a helicopter in and doing the needful thing is a one way trip uncertain of success. We need a hero - probably several. Somebody to blow the rest of the roof off with a missile, and some other bodies have to fly suicide missions into the hole to drop the nuclear retardant. And it has to happen soon.
If somebody doesn't get in there and stop this then attempted operations in the area won't just be suicidal - they'll be pointless, as the radiation will become immediately fatal before the heroes can do their work to cool the other reactors and their "spent" fuel ponds. Oh, and the ponds on top of reactors five and six are heating up now, reactors 1, 2 and 3 still have issues to deal with. Not a good day to be in Tokyo. Fortunately the winds are offshore today.
Geothermal is a good answer for Japan. It's clean, it's cheap, and it'll never run out. It costs a little more up front than nuclear, but if you ask the people in Tokyo today if they would prefer it they might buy in.
It's early days yet for Zune. Microsoft has immense resources to bring to bear, and the patience to see it through. No, wait. That was something else.
The Xoom has features that the iPad doesn't.
Apparently one of these features is that you can go into a store and buy it.
Yes, you are wrong.
No.
Fission must remain a useful source of power regardless of this disaster. Fission still happens whether the electorate wills it or not. Ultimately the sun's fission is where we get all our power from, even if it's been stored as fossil fuels for millions of years. All power is nuclear power.
These plants from 40 years ago are relics of the best of their time, but their day is done. That's a pretty big deal because Japan has lots of nuclear plants from this era. The change will shift monies from one pocket to another.
Ah, the Radio Shack interview. Are they still in business?
I'm so sorry, but you can't use that meme. It's a registered trademark of involuntary speriminator inc.
No compat in the next version though, so it's yet another advantage tossed.
As I said in some other posts, two are known dead. Five reactors at two plants may be losing containment. You can see the explosion at 1:22 in this video. That's the outer containment being blown off a nuclear reactor, so if the inner steel containment is breached, the worst will happen. And it looks like that's going to happen, though it's not reported to have happened yet.
There's a time for blame assessment, for dispassionate analysis of the costs and benefits, for discussion of how modern technologies are better than the technologies afforded these plants from the dark ages of fission. Today is not that time. Today is for expressing regret for the loss of life, the pain and suffering of those affected, to rally what support we may. Today would be a good day to express hope that all five reactors don't go up.
Also, some backup planning would be good. Prevailing winds and ocean currents take the output from this particular location in Japan past Hawaii and then curve back for another tour of Southeast Asia. On a bad day for the US though, the winds and currents tend a bit further north, and deposit their gifts on the West coast of the US, falling as rain in the Sierra Nevada range and the Rockies. If you're downwind of this thing now would be a good time to review your knowledge of the physical effects of radiation exposure. On a bad day I'm downwind from this thing and that matters to me personally, no matter what my opinion of nuclear energy is. Generally I'm for it, but today would be a bad day to hit me up for support for it because this event could, in the worst case, decrease the lifespan of my children.
Now, do you really want to argue about this here and now, or maybe wait a bit and see if the worst case didn't happen?
Two are known dead.
Nuclear power may be completely safe if done correctly. Near the shore of an island formed by volcanic activity may not be the correct place. That may be a better place for geothermal power. But I haven't got the heart for the argument today. Today my heart goes out to the families of the lost, to those suffering now, and to those who may be soon.
Correction: five reactors at two plants.