Actually, we reserve the term "Super-GAU" for that. "GAU" translates to "most severe expected accident"; it's still something you design your facility to handle. Consequently, a Super-GAU is an accident that exceeds what you planned for. An important point is that nuclear plants are required not to emit any radioactive material even in case of a GAU. Therefore, any accident during which the plant does release radioactive material is a Super-GAU.
Three Mile Island is a good example: Back than it was a Super-GAU as nobody designed reactors to handle gas buildup. With modern reactors it's a regular a GAU since modern designs are required to consider that failure mode and mitigate it.
In short: A GAU is "well, I guess after we're done decontamining and repairing the plant we'll need to do quite a bit of lobbying to get it back online". A Super-GAU is "we just contaminated how much land?".
Lando Customer: "Samorost 2? That was never part of our agreement!"
Darth Wolfire: "I am altering the agreement. Pray I will alter it further. Speaking of which... How do you feel about open source software?"
True. They also cleverly added per-platform statistics enticing people to enter higher numbers in order to look good in comparison. I paid 11 USD. Why? Because the Mac average was at 10 USD.
1. Researchers claim that their theory could possibly explain some ball lightning sightings as hallucinations.
2. There are videos of possible ball lightnings.
--------
3. Therefore, the researchers must be wrong.
Formulated more formally (note that I exaggerated the positions for the sake of readability):
1. There is at least one ball lightning sighting that has been caused by a lightning-induced hallucination.
2. There is at least one ball lightning that was captured on video.
--------
3. From 1 and 2 follows: Nothing; the two premises contradict each other.// Logical error
I'm sorry, but "there is" premises (using the existence quantor) can't be refuted by using another such premise. If you can prove that one or even all ball lightning videos are genuine you still can't disprove that ball lightning can be magnetically induced hallucinations.
If you were to prove that all ball lightnings ever witnessed were captured on video you would have an argument but realistically all you could possibly disprove is the claim that all ball lightning sightings are hallucinations, which the scientists never made.
In fact, the scientists didn't even claim that even one such sighting was hallucinatory in the way described. They only claimed that magnetically induced hallucinations could explain some of the sightings since they match typical ball lightning descriptions.
In short: The only erroneous theory is the one you have about what the researchers claimed, which can be refuted by actually reading TFA or even TFS. TFA does go on to generalize a bit but neither the researchers' quotes nor TFS suggest that the researchers ever talked about their theory applying to all ball lightning sightings.
In case you aren't aware yet, the Firefox extensions "Tab Groups Manager" and "Tree Style Tabs" do this, in different ways. The names should say everything. Of course it wouldbe nice if Fx4 had native tab groups.
The solution is to push the retirement age for social security higher (it should be tied to estimated life expectancy statistics)[...]
The problem is that those last twenty years will be quite difficult. After you passed the 50 year mark you can't expect to get a decent job anymore. No, specialized knowledge and plenty of experience don't help; they are a further disincentive as they make you more expensive than a 20 year old college graduate who is much more flexible regarding eccentric work hours and relocation than you anyway.
Yes, WalMart will gladly hire you as a bagger. But if you don't have your retirement money in the bank when you hit 50 you can only hope you don't get downsized or you're not going to make it on your own.
Hollywood is already way ahead of you - they've already developed "Dreck Technology" incorporated into many modern films, which can result in eyeballs exploding without the need for any prosthetics.
The/s is supposed to denote sarcasm? To me that looks like either a broken manual signature or a broken HTML3 strikethrough end tag. You see, the problem with all these idiosyncratic "this denotes sarcasm" practices is that they're idiosyncratic. The only two ones I know to work are either making the content an obvious mockery of itself (as was the case in the GGP) and "</sarcasm>". "/s", "~", "!" and "..." are all ambiguous.
As for the GGP's post itself: The legisnation is far too tame, you pirate. The authorities should be required by law to immediately execute without process or investigation everyone suspected of consuming media without having the proper license to do so. Only force can protect us from the single greatest threat mankind has ever encountered, copyright infringement theft.
Not a problem. We just need to cook with gas and be a 12.0 on a 10.0 scale of badness. With a headful of mad and a handful of vertebrae, no one can stop us.
Even if we're going to be radioactive. That can't be good.
Same here. Used PSP versions 3 through 7, bailed on it when they redesigned the UI to look like Photoshop.
The GIMP took a while getting used to and some aspects are still clunky - but I think it's fairly easy to learn in a reasonable amount of time. Photoshop, on the other hand, is like EMACS: It's really powerful but the interface is hideously unintuitive and it has a really steep learning curve compared to its competitors.
There seems to be a divide between those who grew up with Photoshop-like UIs and those who didn't. The former think that Photoshop has the only intuitive GUI, the latter think that Photoshop's UI is unneccessarily cryptic.
I occasionally play Battletech with friends via MegaMek, using Solaris Skunk Werks to build custom mechs. (Note: Being Java-based, both of these work beautifully on Linux and OS X and MegaMek even provides an app bundle.)
I know about the power of tons of smallish lasers (although I usually prefer normal Medium Lasers over ER ones for better heat/damage ratio). Both headshots and through-armor crits on ammo stockpiles can be lethal and both occur with frightening frequency.
Of course if you absolutely want to maximize the number of possible headshots, get yourself an LB-X boat. You can fit four LB 10-X ACs and twelve tons of ammunition (translating to 30.5 turns of sustained fire) into a fully armored assault mech with an XL engine. Granted, you can only run five hexes but with cluster ammunition you can inflict up to 40 separate hits per turn on an enemy up to eighteen hexes away.
I just pitted two of those beasts against each other. Both exploded in the third turn because they through-armor-critted each others ammo dumps and one of the pilots already had been hit three times. Nasty. And if you cut down on the ammo a bit you can even put in happy little surprises as an ECM unit or a coupls lasers; with double heat sinks those hulks generate a mere 10 heat a round and sink 20.
The price you pay is a BV of about 1800 but hey, you have an assault crit monster - what do you expect?
The problem is that "relatively rare" isn't. Just thinking back at the last ten years a good number of relatively rare things have happened to my family. Off the top of my head...
My father got downsized because the board replaced his bosses with idiots - and being older than 50 years he was utterly unhirable and had to retire early (don't think that a brilliant track record, specialized skills and glowing recommendations will get you a job at that age).
My brother got shot in the leg, which resulted in a multi-month stay in hospital and screwed up his leg just enough to reduce his job chances - but not enough to qualify as a disability so he doesn't get preferential hiring.
Both of these are unlikely to happen to you but each one of them (and a whole lot of other things) can completely ruin your careful planning through no fault of your own. They don't even need to happen to you; what if a close relative ends up spending half a year in hospital and no one but you is there to foot the bill? Do you tell them to die or you you burn through your retirement savings to help them out?
Of course you can just go with what you recommended and accept that your life just crashed and burned but then again most people don't like living in poverty because they got hit by a car twenty years ago. Or because the bank managing their savings accounts got fried during a stock crash.
Proper planning for the future also ought to include the worst case. Financially, the worst case is "I am in debt and can't make any money". "I guess I'm screwed, then" is not a good plan for that contingency.
Legging mechs is usually the best approach anyway as destroying both legs is an instant death sentence and the leg armor isn't nearly as thick as the one on the torso.
Also, utterly insane loadouts with twin Long Toms will blow up every target's legs first by default - if you can deal with absurd amounts of heat, a glacial ROF and little ammo.
The somewhat dubious use of spending two crits, one of which is explosive, on as many points of damage nonwithstanding.
Not that that matters in MW4; there, machine guns are actually quite powerful if used in masses. Apart from having ammo problems, a Daishi/Dire Wolf with nothing but machine guns works surprisingly well against pretty much anything.
I find it interesting that a device running Unix and with built-in multiboot capabilities is perceived as "overly simplified". Okay, I admit that Apple gives you all Windows drivers for your system on the OS X installation DVD and you don't have to configure the bootloader by hand... But then again the most popular Linux distros also take driver configuration and bootloader management from your hands.
Admittedly, OS X tends to have a more streamlined GUI but so has GNOME; doesn't keep people from seeing it as a viable DE. And nowhere in OS X am I kept from going to/etc/ or/System/Library and messing around with the files there. Granted,/etc is hidden in the Finder by default, but the shell ignores that and the Finder can be told to show it (admittedly requiring an incantation from the shell).
I'm by no means a rabid fanboy. There are use cases where OS X makes sense (eg. desktop Unix; movie editing) and a lot more where it doesn't (eg. playing current games; using Windows software without virtualization or Wine; its server management tools aren't the greatest either). If you want a decently-built computer to run Windows or Linux on you'll probably be happier with an HP or a Lenovo. But the only place I can think of off the top of my head where I'm well and truly locked out by OS X is Apple's attempts to prevent people from building Hackintoshes.
Of course, compared to Windows, putting application-specific preferences in ~/Library/Preferences instead of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive is greatly simplified. It's a simplification I can live with, though.
(I suspect, though, that the actual problematic oversimplification is just you hearing that "Macs are easier" and projecting your dislike of the platform as a whole onto that specific property of it. Nobody sane denies that Apple are a legion of scumbags; you can safely use real arguments to rant about them.)
At least we nomads only have to worry about that storm - unlike Americans who are hit by a constant barrage of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanos and who have to deal with the sparse vegetation going up in lethal firestorms every other year or so.
Seriously, it's a wonder there's any life at all on North America. No wonder you invented nuclear weapons; anything less doesn't even register against the hellish conditions of that purgatory-like continent you live on.
Depends. While you may not find the court proceedings particularly fascinating, someone in the future may well write a book about them. There are billions of dollars worth of claims at stake here and some very big corporations are very interested in the case.
While it's not the event of the century, even smaller events like this can be found interesting enough to be researched thoroughly, especially if they have interesting repercussions. For instance, if unixoid operating systems continue to be as important as they are today - of if they don't.
Actually, their rationale for this is that Ogg is now used in different contexts where an index becomes neccessary. In more contexts, xiphmont maintains, simply implementing the recommended searching strategy would suffice as it can scan to any part of the file and continue playing within about three seeks.
Actually, the criticism came from someone who contributes to another open source container format. It was just one OSS developer trying to bad-mouth a competing project - and getting shot down.
I'm note sure, however you've been arguing all along that its technically impossible for Google to gain access to your MAC address through you using any of their services or programs, which is wrong. I argued against your specific point that it's completely impossible to ever disclose a MAC address outside of the LAN.
Okay. You apparently believe that only your NIC can ever see your MAC address. That is not true. If on a BSD-based computer, type "ifconfig" into a terminal and look for lines containing "ether". Those lines show the MAC addresses of all real or virtual NICs in your computer, accessed from a bog-standard user-mode program making a bog-standard system call. Linux and Windows also offer methods for user-mode programs to determine the MAC address of your NIC(s).
Google gets your MAC address when Google Earth connects to their server. Not because somehow suddenly their server is in your LAN but because Google Earth uses the appropriate API to determine that MAC addresse and send it to the server. And it sends ot not in the headers of any packets it sends but in the body. Because it's the content of those packets.
I want to make this abundantly clear: This is not abot Google magically determining your MAC address from you visiting their website, it's about you running software form Google that uses system calls to determine the MAC address and then sends it to Google. Google Earth is not Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, nor does it run inside them. Google Earth is a native application developed and distributed by Google Inc., which you have to install and execute on your machine. And as a native application it's capable of using system calls and of sending data obtained using those system calls to Google.
We're talking about Google Earth in this subthread. Google Earth obtains your MAC address an sends it to Google. Now Google has your external IP address and your MAC address. (I'm not sure whether they also determine your router's MAC address or just your computer's but it's entirely possible for them to do both.)
Wardriving is only involved in linking your router's MAC address to your physical location, which is an entirely separate process.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we reserve the term "Super-GAU" for that. "GAU" translates to "most severe expected accident"; it's still something you design your facility to handle. Consequently, a Super-GAU is an accident that exceeds what you planned for. An important point is that nuclear plants are required not to emit any radioactive material even in case of a GAU. Therefore, any accident during which the plant does release radioactive material is a Super-GAU.
Three Mile Island is a good example: Back than it was a Super-GAU as nobody designed reactors to handle gas buildup. With modern reactors it's a regular a GAU since modern designs are required to consider that failure mode and mitigate it.
In short: A GAU is "well, I guess after we're done decontamining and repairing the plant we'll need to do quite a bit of lobbying to get it back online". A Super-GAU is "we just contaminated how much land?".
What is a “<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.de” domain? And why are there millions of them?
It's just Slash demonstrating that it speaks neither Unicode nor HTML.
Lando Customer: "Samorost 2? That was never part of our agreement!"
Darth Wolfire: "I am altering the agreement. Pray I will alter it further. Speaking of which... How do you feel about open source software?"
True. They also cleverly added per-platform statistics enticing people to enter higher numbers in order to look good in comparison. I paid 11 USD. Why? Because the Mac average was at 10 USD.
This is what you argue:
// Logical error
1. Researchers claim that their theory could possibly explain some ball lightning sightings as hallucinations.
2. There are videos of possible ball lightnings.
--------
3. Therefore, the researchers must be wrong.
Formulated more formally (note that I exaggerated the positions for the sake of readability):
1. There is at least one ball lightning sighting that has been caused by a lightning-induced hallucination.
2. There is at least one ball lightning that was captured on video.
--------
3. From 1 and 2 follows: Nothing; the two premises contradict each other.
I'm sorry, but "there is" premises (using the existence quantor) can't be refuted by using another such premise. If you can prove that one or even all ball lightning videos are genuine you still can't disprove that ball lightning can be magnetically induced hallucinations.
If you were to prove that all ball lightnings ever witnessed were captured on video you would have an argument but realistically all you could possibly disprove is the claim that all ball lightning sightings are hallucinations, which the scientists never made.
In fact, the scientists didn't even claim that even one such sighting was hallucinatory in the way described. They only claimed that magnetically induced hallucinations could explain some of the sightings since they match typical ball lightning descriptions.
In short: The only erroneous theory is the one you have about what the researchers claimed, which can be refuted by actually reading TFA or even TFS. TFA does go on to generalize a bit but neither the researchers' quotes nor TFS suggest that the researchers ever talked about their theory applying to all ball lightning sightings.
In case you aren't aware yet, the Firefox extensions "Tab Groups Manager" and "Tree Style Tabs" do this, in different ways. The names should say everything. Of course it wouldbe nice if Fx4 had native tab groups.
The solution is to push the retirement age for social security higher (it should be tied to estimated life expectancy statistics)[...]
The problem is that those last twenty years will be quite difficult. After you passed the 50 year mark you can't expect to get a decent job anymore. No, specialized knowledge and plenty of experience don't help; they are a further disincentive as they make you more expensive than a 20 year old college graduate who is much more flexible regarding eccentric work hours and relocation than you anyway.
Yes, WalMart will gladly hire you as a bagger. But if you don't have your retirement money in the bank when you hit 50 you can only hope you don't get downsized or you're not going to make it on your own.
Has anyone abused this to follow themselves? That has much more fun potential than pretending random strangers care about your tweets.
Hollywood is already way ahead of you - they've already developed "Dreck Technology" incorporated into many modern films, which can result in eyeballs exploding without the need for any prosthetics.
Wasn't that invented by Michael Bay?
The /s is supposed to denote sarcasm? To me that looks like either a broken manual signature or a broken HTML3 strikethrough end tag. You see, the problem with all these idiosyncratic "this denotes sarcasm" practices is that they're idiosyncratic. The only two ones I know to work are either making the content an obvious mockery of itself (as was the case in the GGP) and "</sarcasm>". "/s", "~", "!" and "..." are all ambiguous.
As for the GGP's post itself: The legisnation is far too tame, you pirate. The authorities should be required by law to immediately execute without process or investigation everyone suspected of consuming media without having the proper license to do so. Only force can protect us from the single greatest threat mankind has ever encountered, copyright infringement theft.
Either way, our doom is imminent.
Not a problem. We just need to cook with gas and be a 12.0 on a 10.0 scale of badness. With a headful of mad and a handful of vertebrae, no one can stop us.
Even if we're going to be radioactive. That can't be good.
Same here. Used PSP versions 3 through 7, bailed on it when they redesigned the UI to look like Photoshop.
The GIMP took a while getting used to and some aspects are still clunky - but I think it's fairly easy to learn in a reasonable amount of time. Photoshop, on the other hand, is like EMACS: It's really powerful but the interface is hideously unintuitive and it has a really steep learning curve compared to its competitors.
There seems to be a divide between those who grew up with Photoshop-like UIs and those who didn't. The former think that Photoshop has the only intuitive GUI, the latter think that Photoshop's UI is unneccessarily cryptic.
I occasionally play Battletech with friends via MegaMek, using Solaris Skunk Werks to build custom mechs. (Note: Being Java-based, both of these work beautifully on Linux and OS X and MegaMek even provides an app bundle.)
I know about the power of tons of smallish lasers (although I usually prefer normal Medium Lasers over ER ones for better heat/damage ratio). Both headshots and through-armor crits on ammo stockpiles can be lethal and both occur with frightening frequency.
Of course if you absolutely want to maximize the number of possible headshots, get yourself an LB-X boat. You can fit four LB 10-X ACs and twelve tons of ammunition (translating to 30.5 turns of sustained fire) into a fully armored assault mech with an XL engine. Granted, you can only run five hexes but with cluster ammunition you can inflict up to 40 separate hits per turn on an enemy up to eighteen hexes away.
I just pitted two of those beasts against each other. Both exploded in the third turn because they through-armor-critted each others ammo dumps and one of the pilots already had been hit three times. Nasty. And if you cut down on the ammo a bit you can even put in happy little surprises as an ECM unit or a coupls lasers; with double heat sinks those hulks generate a mere 10 heat a round and sink 20.
The price you pay is a BV of about 1800 but hey, you have an assault crit monster - what do you expect?
The problem is that "relatively rare" isn't. Just thinking back at the last ten years a good number of relatively rare things have happened to my family. Off the top of my head...
My father got downsized because the board replaced his bosses with idiots - and being older than 50 years he was utterly unhirable and had to retire early (don't think that a brilliant track record, specialized skills and glowing recommendations will get you a job at that age).
My brother got shot in the leg, which resulted in a multi-month stay in hospital and screwed up his leg just enough to reduce his job chances - but not enough to qualify as a disability so he doesn't get preferential hiring.
Both of these are unlikely to happen to you but each one of them (and a whole lot of other things) can completely ruin your careful planning through no fault of your own. They don't even need to happen to you; what if a close relative ends up spending half a year in hospital and no one but you is there to foot the bill? Do you tell them to die or you you burn through your retirement savings to help them out?
Of course you can just go with what you recommended and accept that your life just crashed and burned but then again most people don't like living in poverty because they got hit by a car twenty years ago. Or because the bank managing their savings accounts got fried during a stock crash.
Proper planning for the future also ought to include the worst case. Financially, the worst case is "I am in debt and can't make any money". "I guess I'm screwed, then" is not a good plan for that contingency.
Legging mechs is usually the best approach anyway as destroying both legs is an instant death sentence and the leg armor isn't nearly as thick as the one on the torso.
Also, utterly insane loadouts with twin Long Toms will blow up every target's legs first by default - if you can deal with absurd amounts of heat, a glacial ROF and little ammo.
The somewhat dubious use of spending two crits, one of which is explosive, on as many points of damage nonwithstanding.
Not that that matters in MW4; there, machine guns are actually quite powerful if used in masses. Apart from having ammo problems, a Daishi/Dire Wolf with nothing but machine guns works surprisingly well against pretty much anything.
I find it interesting that a device running Unix and with built-in multiboot capabilities is perceived as "overly simplified". Okay, I admit that Apple gives you all Windows drivers for your system on the OS X installation DVD and you don't have to configure the bootloader by hand... But then again the most popular Linux distros also take driver configuration and bootloader management from your hands.
/etc/ or /System/Library and messing around with the files there. Granted, /etc is hidden in the Finder by default, but the shell ignores that and the Finder can be told to show it (admittedly requiring an incantation from the shell).
Admittedly, OS X tends to have a more streamlined GUI but so has GNOME; doesn't keep people from seeing it as a viable DE. And nowhere in OS X am I kept from going to
I'm by no means a rabid fanboy. There are use cases where OS X makes sense (eg. desktop Unix; movie editing) and a lot more where it doesn't (eg. playing current games; using Windows software without virtualization or Wine; its server management tools aren't the greatest either). If you want a decently-built computer to run Windows or Linux on you'll probably be happier with an HP or a Lenovo. But the only place I can think of off the top of my head where I'm well and truly locked out by OS X is Apple's attempts to prevent people from building Hackintoshes.
Of course, compared to Windows, putting application-specific preferences in ~/Library/Preferences instead of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive is greatly simplified. It's a simplification I can live with, though.
(I suspect, though, that the actual problematic oversimplification is just you hearing that "Macs are easier" and projecting your dislike of the platform as a whole onto that specific property of it. Nobody sane denies that Apple are a legion of scumbags; you can safely use real arguments to rant about them.)
At least we nomads only have to worry about that storm - unlike Americans who are hit by a constant barrage of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanos and who have to deal with the sparse vegetation going up in lethal firestorms every other year or so.
Seriously, it's a wonder there's any life at all on North America. No wonder you invented nuclear weapons; anything less doesn't even register against the hellish conditions of that purgatory-like continent you live on.
Depends. While you may not find the court proceedings particularly fascinating, someone in the future may well write a book about them. There are billions of dollars worth of claims at stake here and some very big corporations are very interested in the case.
While it's not the event of the century, even smaller events like this can be found interesting enough to be researched thoroughly, especially if they have interesting repercussions. For instance, if unixoid operating systems continue to be as important as they are today - of if they don't.
Actually, their rationale for this is that Ogg is now used in different contexts where an index becomes neccessary. In more contexts, xiphmont maintains, simply implementing the recommended searching strategy would suffice as it can scan to any part of the file and continue playing within about three seeks.
Actually, the criticism came from someone who contributes to another open source container format. It was just one OSS developer trying to bad-mouth a competing project - and getting shot down.
Except that TFA mentions they're likely to put an index in the next revision of Ogg.
I'm note sure, however you've been arguing all along that its technically impossible for Google to gain access to your MAC address through you using any of their services or programs, which is wrong. I argued against your specific point that it's completely impossible to ever disclose a MAC address outside of the LAN.
Okay. You apparently believe that only your NIC can ever see your MAC address. That is not true. If on a BSD-based computer, type "ifconfig" into a terminal and look for lines containing "ether". Those lines show the MAC addresses of all real or virtual NICs in your computer, accessed from a bog-standard user-mode program making a bog-standard system call. Linux and Windows also offer methods for user-mode programs to determine the MAC address of your NIC(s).
Google gets your MAC address when Google Earth connects to their server. Not because somehow suddenly their server is in your LAN but because Google Earth uses the appropriate API to determine that MAC addresse and send it to the server. And it sends ot not in the headers of any packets it sends but in the body. Because it's the content of those packets.
I want to make this abundantly clear: This is not abot Google magically determining your MAC address from you visiting their website, it's about you running software form Google that uses system calls to determine the MAC address and then sends it to Google. Google Earth is not Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, nor does it run inside them. Google Earth is a native application developed and distributed by Google Inc., which you have to install and execute on your machine. And as a native application it's capable of using system calls and of sending data obtained using those system calls to Google.
We're talking about Google Earth in this subthread. Google Earth obtains your MAC address an sends it to Google. Now Google has your external IP address and your MAC address. (I'm not sure whether they also determine your router's MAC address or just your computer's but it's entirely possible for them to do both.)
Wardriving is only involved in linking your router's MAC address to your physical location, which is an entirely separate process.