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Comment Love Introversion :-) (Score 3) 96

I've been a long term fan of Introversion since 2002, I even went to their Darwinia launch party at their house, which was awesome. I was so stoked about the Humble IV Bundle that even though I had bought the games twice in the past (disc and steam) I had to buy this too, both to support IV and also Humble (backed by the same people who backed Google so probably don't need that much support!).

Regards the source. That has been available for about 6 years now on the Uplink dev disc. This costs about £20. I haven't looked into the restrictions on using it but as the previous poster recommends, contact them before doing anything that might piss them off. They're really nice guys and deserve support for making what are, really enjoyable games. Uplink was in the PC Zone top 50 games, and in LXF's top 20 games for scaring the sh1t out of you.

Hopefully this /.'ing will bake the bundle sell even more. It was at about $510,000 last night, so will be interesting to see how it goes up after this.

Comment Re:Translation: (Score 3, Informative) 493

Sweetheart rates? We're insured by a private insurer, but thanks for checking your facts. And when there is a catastrophic accident, the government would support us, just like they'd support you if a catastrophic accident took out your hospital. It's almost as if you don't actually use nuclear power...

Comment This editor should be shot! (Score 5, Informative) 493

OK, I'm a reactor operator for a nuclear reactor and this report is talking about "beyond design basis" faults. Faults which were not taken account for within the safety case for the plant. Now, bear in mind that this area of the world is not susceptible to the kinds of earthquakes Japan is, and also the fact that tsunamis just cannot happen to most of France's plants because they're inland, would make the event that happened in Japan certainly beyond design basis. Now, that's not to say that more safety cannot be added. Many of France's plants are relatively old and new ideas have been integrated into newer plants. All this report is talking about is that more things can be done to address big bang type stuff, stuff that's practicable and useful, like adding more generators and installing them onto roofs. Not prohibitively costly, and can be useful in most faults. There's always more things that can be done to all plants, it's a judge of whether it's practicable, economical and in all probabilities, worth it. If statistically, an event is not likely to happen for 10,000,000 years, are you really going to design it out?

This report isn't saying that France's plants are unsafe. The editor should be shot. In my opinion, Fukushima was a success. These plants were due to be taken out of service within a year, they were very very old, old design and old in age. Yet, even with a massive earth quake, and a beyond design basis fault that wasn't understood during their design phase, no-one died due to radiation and contamination is well controlled and understood. It's also worth noting that all the modern PWRs in Japan surrounding Fukushima all shut down properly with no issues.

Comment Re:Subject (Score 5, Informative) 266

I'm trying to work out if you're being sarcastic or not. Of course you can have uncontrolled criticalities in a shutdown reactor. All you need to do it put enough fissionable material together and you'll get a criticallity event. They're usually just flashes and last fractions of a second, but it does happen. History is littered with these events. A shutdown reactor with the right levels of boron, still with core geometry intact will not have un-controlled criticalities, in that you are correct. However, this reactor does not have core geometry anymore and you can therefore not prove that the boron is getting everywhere and that the fuel hasn't managed to arrange itself into fissionable quantities.

Comment The Nuclear Industry (Score 1) 585

I work on a nuclear power station and there are several people who are nearing the age of retirement who are "information hoarders". They have the opinion that the more information that only they know, they more powerful and secure they are. I have come to learn the exact opposite is actually true.

I work in the main control room and frequently have to call the system experts about an alarm or an anomaly and you very quickly figure out who are the more useful and who are the most useless. The useless ones are the ones who restrict the information. I need to speak to people who openly share their knowledge and information. I don't "steal" it, or never need them again. In fact, since I know how useful they are, I tend to deliberately not remember what they say because I know I can just go back to them.

Information shares and people who are happy to help are more useful and more powerful than the latter.

Comment Wisdom in crowds (Score 1) 209

I saw something on a BBC show called The Code. A guy walked around an office asking people how many jelly beans were in a big jar. Answers ranged from 40 to 80,000, when the actual answer was something like 1440. He asked 160 people, and when averaged, the final figure was 1445.

There is wisdom in crowds. Specially regard the stock market, which it's the crowd sentiment that determines the stock price, not the value of the company.
Crime

Submission + - Facebook helps trace laptop looter (bbc.co.uk) 1

DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly writes: A former NASA and FBI employee had had his laptop stolen during the recent looting and rioting in Britain. However, being an IT security professional, he had installed a tracking device into it so he sat, patiently waiting for his computer to phone home. "After two hours of watching him surf religious revelation videos, shopping for Mercedes A class on Autotrader he finally popped onto Facebook!". He said the information included the man's name, school, address in west London and information about his wireless internet. After he handed the details over to police, they raided the man's flat and recovered the laptop.
Microsoft

Submission + - Internet Explorer users have a lower IQ (bbc.co.uk)

DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly writes: The BBC has discovered an interesting study that suggests Internet Explorer users have a lower than average IQ, according to research by Consulting firm AptiQuant. The study gave web surfers an IQ test, then plotted their scores against the browser they used. IE surfers were found to have an average IQ lower than people using Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Users of Camino and Opera rated highest. Their own website states that people are queueing up to sue them!

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