Oblarg

You're missing the point - the plant was never designed to deal with this type of quake in the first place. That includes the system for restoring the reactor after the damage is done. This is not a failure of the system to do what it's designed to do, because the system was not designed to deal with this type of damage. Whether or not it should (or even could) have been designed to deal with a disaster of this magnitude is another issue entirely.

Stop it with the nonsequiturs - A plant got hit by a quake which it was not designed to withstand. That's all that happened. It's not unreasonable, either - it was an old plant, and it's almost impossible to design things to be able to withstand an 8.9 quake. Or are you really naive enough to think that crisis response is logistically trivial, especially given the huge destruction of infrastructure following a disaster such as this?

This reactor wasn't horribly designed - it was never built to cope with an earthquake of this magnitude. It was built to withstand a magnitude 8.2 earthquake - that's a factor of 7 smaller than the one which hit it. The fact that they were able to contain the problems in reactors 1 and 3 is impressive enough. You can't failsafe against every possible calamity. Standard practice, I believe, is to plan for the worst single possible problem you can cope with, and design the system to be able to withstand that plus one other failure. The amount of things that went wrong was unprecedented and not easily foreseeable. This was not some huge ****up on the part of the Japanese, this was simply a horrible natural disaster.

Cool footage. Loving the graphics, and some of those sword attacks look awesomely visceral.

The problem is that /v/ raided the site. If you notice, DA II has 1355 reviews while ME 2 has 710 reviews despite being a year older. Nonsense - /v/ would never do an "organized" raid of a game's ratings, of all things, especially a game they really don't give a **** about. And if there had been some sort of conspiracy to drown it in negative user reviews, you'd see way more than that.

It's important to remember that this is only for elementary school and that this is not meant for the higher educations.. I don't think we are quite ready for this in high school/college or universities yet. The Danish variety isn't that hippie.. I've met a few of the students (a 6 year old and a 14 year old) and they were both years ahead of kids their age - so articulate, critical thinking and literally brimming with excitement about almost all subjects. I could really feel that knowledge was something that was important and very alive for them. I was downright scared at their ability for lateral thinking - it was beyond anything I had seen in normal public schools.. And these kids weren't from super homes - their parents were normal 9-5 workers. The 14 year old was even from a single parent home, where the mother had to work 2 jobs.. so it's not like they have more resources at home. It exists for a reason in high school, college and university - but why in elementary school? Kids are amazing at learning when we give them the freedom to do it .. I think it's quite interesting that a kid has no problems learning 5 languages if they are spoken in their home, but have trouble learning 2 languages that are taught at school. Here's the thing (and I realize this is anecdotal, but it's also true): I had a childhood friend who went to a "school" that functioned on this very principle. I distinctly remember some time around third or fourth grade, when it really became apparent that he simply didn't grow up at the rate of people going to public school - He couldn't consistently read or write (something any decent school system teaches in first grade), and socially he hadn't really developed nearly as much as any of my other friends. He stood out, and it was awkward - it was easy to tell, even at that age. I have no faith in this sort of system. I consider myself to be a pretty smart guy, but if I had the choice back when I was a kid I certainly would have rather wasted my time on fun and games than learning the necessary skills needed to learn more difficult concepts later in life. The fact is, as much as people running these schools don't want to admit it, kids don't know what's best for them in the long run.

So, it's a glorified day care? Honestly, structured curricula exist for a reason.

Consoles seemed to be the focus for the release, I intend to pick it up on 360 at some point, but the PC version has this bug, and my g/f has witnessed a nasty bug where she got caught in the collision mesh, thankfully she is an obsessive when its comes to saving. DA:O must have done really well on console, I know this much though... I'm prefering DA 2 to DA:O. Console DA2 plays just like DA:O, except you press the A button multiple times per second. There's no auto-attack.

Best rhythm section ever? Actually, the entire band is just really damn talented.

And...BioWare actually didn't include auto-attack on the console versions. Seriously, this is ****ing disgraceful.

New Vicious Rumors track streaming Well, they're back. ****ing speed metal.

Man, Carl Albert was ****ing awesome. Possibly my favorite heavy metal vocalist (excluding John Arch, of course, who is on a higher plane of existence).

Helstar - Destroyer Those ****ing solos...Yngwie wishes he could write something that good.

Sure. Actually, there's no reason to believe this. It certainly would look normal-ish, but it's not a sampling distribution and thus there's absolutely no reason to believe it actually is a normal distribution - while you can approximate many things fairly well as a normal distribution, there is no magical property of nature that causes all these natural systems to adhere to it - there are simply a lot of distributions which closely resemble a normal distribution.

Except it's quite relevant - I have a direct source of authority on the subject. You don't - you have speculation. But good job on looking like a prick. A good way to look at chess is that it's similar to poker - a level of memorization is needed to predict the outcomes of various moves in various situations, but that's more of a prerequisite which is required to play effectively. The real skill is not in the memorization, and what determines the winner when there are not vast skill gaps involved is not who has memorized more - in poker, you do not get better by memorizing more odds. It's the same in chess - you do not simply improve by memorizing more positions.

Chess is essentially pattern recognition. You can perhaps recognize a pattern if you haven't seen it before, but having played a gazillon games and being familiar with the most common patterns is what distinguishes top-ranked players from amateurs. In high-level games, reasoning and branch pruning heuristics may play a bigger role as players go out of their way to seek less analyzed scenarios, but other than that, yeah, it's memory. My brother's a Fide Master. I'm sure he'd be willing to attest to the fact that it's not mostly memory. You're wrong here - it's as simple as that. Admit it and move on.

Sorry, that's a load of ****. While a large part of it is memorization (largely the openings), to say chess is "not a game of skill" is silly and ignorant.

Cool interview, but I don't like the parallels the guy drew to SupCom2 - that game was an utter ****pile.

Fates Warning - Through Different Eyes

You *don't need an account.* When the login screen pops up, hit "cancel." You can still play the demo.

You don't need an account for the demo...

Just played through the demo - pretty ****ing dull. The dialogue wasn't especially bad by BioWare standards, but nothing particularly great, either. The framing story is as cheese-packed and cliche as they come ("HE'S THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!"). Tactics amounted to little more than right clicking on a target and hitting abilities when they came up - stamina/mana management was *never* an issue. Graphics were OK, I guess. The camera blows, though, and makes targetting a pain.

The solution for Iran is to wait. The older generation will die, and the younger generation doesn't seem too keen on putting up with the Islamist bull**** once they're gone.

We can only wait and see.

Well, this had to happen eventually. The region was never particularly stable.