Some ten year old hanging chads would like to have a word with you.
My local district still uses a paper ballot, but let's not pretend it doesn't have its own limitations, too.
And hanging chads are an artefact of - guess it! - voting machines. In this case mechanical ones. Pure paper ballots work just fine all over the world - voting machines are needless automation, and can and will fuck things up.
Let me guess: The Advertising Option Icon will be a 1x1 transparent gif?
Even worse, with some clever XSS you can make Slashdot post the same story twice!
Oh wait, that's just shitty editing. Sorry.
Science reporting at its best. I especially liked this quote:
The only way to glimpse what lies beneath its opaque clouds is by radar, and several missions have carried our radar surveys from orbit, principally the Magellan probe which operated from 1990 to 1994.
It's not like we have pictures from the surface of Venus or anything...
That goes for your post as well. While Venus is a fascinating planet in many ways, and I too would like to see more probes sent to it, your post comes across as crackpottery:
Even if all these probes can tell us is how blisteringly hot it is, that's got to tell us *something* about the environment. Venus sounds like a metal-ore refinery, and I'd love for someone to decide that it's worth a few (hundred) billion bucks to go get some of that Unobtanium (or whatever) and bring it back to Earth.
SQL and C? I'd use Chef for this task...
Amen. Not to mention that the EU has a history of bending over backwards for lobbyists, evil Orwellian shit and selling out its citizens' privacy to foreign nations.
So this declaration feels less like "Oi! Stop drafting that treaty!" and more like "Oi! Stop drafting that treaty without giving us a chance to add some juicy bits!".
THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!!
5 exclamation marks. In the words of the great Terry Pratchett: "A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head."
It's a good thing when the information is relevant, sure. It's a bad thing when you're misleading people. Next you'll be wanting warning about autism placed on all vaccines. Sorry, but when your "information" is only there as a way of furthering the agenda of insane conspiracy theorists, it's definitely not a "Good Thing".
Straw man much?
An almost reasonable analogy would be wanting to make available, say, how much mercury is in each dose of vaccine. Like a SAR value, that would be a simple, neutral statement of fact. Of course, it would still be a straw man since besides Wakefield's thoroughly discredited "study", nobody has found any link whatsoever between vaccines and autism, while there is actual concern of harm from cellphone EM radiation from scientists (see the paper I linked for example). Mandatory SAR information laws are already in place in various places in the world, and AFAIK nobody has found any disadvantages to it. Around here, for example, it has just given consumers more choice: most people don't care one iota about it, but those who do can now make an informed choice.
Oh, and for future reference, "furthering the agenda of $group" is one of those phrases that set off people's bullshit detectors. With good reason.
*sigh*
I realize that you are making fun of the morons who believe that anything with the words "radiation" or "nuclear" in it is horrible and dangerous and should be banned - i.e. the kind of people who forced "NMR" to be changed to "MRI". Unfortunately, the other extreme, the "If it's not ionizing it's completely harmless!" brigade, is just as bad. There are plenty of ways of causing harm without messing with DNA directly. Would you be ok with looking into a 250 W laser? A 250 W UV light all day? Sticking your head in a microwave and turning it to 250 W? It's all just non-ionizing EM radiation! It's safe!
Now, do cellphones cause cancer? The best answer we have right now is "probably not" (getting definitive answers from epidemiological studies is notoriously difficult).
Am I personally concerned? No.
Is people's exposure to cellphone radiation a legitimate concern though? Definitely yes. Nobody studying this believes that cellphone radiation is ionizing, or even that it causes cancer by direct action. What people are concerned about are more subtle, indirect effects, like for example altered blood-brain barrier permeability. EM fields and RF radiation can do funky stuff to your brain. Could some of those interactions be (indirectly) carcinogenic? It's a possibility, but epidemiological evidence so far suggests otherwise. Could there be other, non-carcinogenic health effects of concern? Quite possibly.
In any case, consumer choice and information is a good thing. If you think cellphone radiation is completely harmless, just ignore the SAR value. If you are concerned, you get our current best estimate on the possible danger level. Everyone wins.
I'll answer in the form of three abbreviations.
FFS, RTFA: SAR.
(including Jonathan Clark, the husband of an astronaut who died in the Columbia disaster)
So wait. Was this 'Jonathan Clark' a woman? Or was the 'astronaut' gay? Is this a weird typo?
Are you for real? You do know that women can be astronauts too, right?
The crew of STS-107 consisted of 5 men and 2 women. One of those was Laurel Clark.
Yeah, but "75mT"? It's nice to see US Senators trying to get to grips with this new fangled metric system when they specify their pork, but 75 milli-Tonnes would be 75KG.
I thought of Arthur C Clarke's A Slight Case of Sunstroke myself...
As they are a point source, lasers adhere to the inverse-square law of decay [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law]
Previously released lasers from these guys that can light cigarettes etc are only effective within 300mm or so.
I will make the uneducated guess that [hopefully] these 1W versions will be unable to be used with malicious intent / outcome from a large distance.
Argh. The inverse-square law applies to omnidirectional point source radiators. A laser pointer is extremely directional by definition...
Oh hey, a
But are these "serious games" fun to play? That seems to be the most overlooked part of educational games.
They don't have to be. You're confusing serious games with edutainment - the latter is entertainment with an educational value (even if it, as you pointed out, quite often fails at the "entertainment" bit), while the former is basically education in the form of a game. Think "military war game" compared to "chess". Different aims, different audience. A lot of serious games would actually be called simulators, if that word hadn't carried so much semantic baggage with it.
The project I'm involved in, aimed at firefighters and other rescue workers, is intended to be an replacement for and complement to certain live (and therefore dangerous and expensive) exercises, for example. That means it's meant to be played with instructors present, as part of their normal education regime. Thus, there's no need to "sell" the game with entertainment. Trainees can practice on their own if they want to (PC-based software), but if they do, they do it for the sake of their own education.
Anyway, if anyone's interested in the subject I can recommend the freely available
From Gaming to Training: A Review of Studies on Fidelity, Immersion, Presence, and Buy-in and Their Effects on Transfer in PC-Based Simulations and Games. It's DARPA-funded (DARWARS - I love that name!) so it's aimed at military educational gaming, but it's a good introduction to the field.
Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"
