Some kid gives you a quest to save his father from fire ants there - and if you have perk child at heart, I think, he will also give you the key to the container. There are some supplies in there - pretty useful at the game's beginning, if you ask me

I know about Talon, but Wolfgang is a trader, he is not supposed to attack unless you've done something.
Yes, there is a group if you've been bad, The Regulators.
To me, that's pretty funny, because The Regulators were a bad group of people.
EDIT:
and yes, there are random encounters, even the traders are random.
I once met a trader with a pet bear (i forget the name of them) who had killed a robot and he was all 'you stay away from my robot!!' and I was walking by it and he was all 'that's it, you're dead!' I tried fighting them off but he absolutely wasted me. At the same spot (this is the meresti station) in an earlier game, I came across a deathclaw at level 2.

My most random encounter definitely involved the roach king. It's a guy with a mini gun with some roaches. He's got a sweet helmet though. One other time I ran into a scavenger fighting some raiders near a vault entrance, killed the raiders, the scav said 'don't come near me' right when i was going up to talk to him and turned hostile. I happened to have my friendly paladin with a sledge hammer with me and she turned him into mush pretty quickly.
The only time I've seen a deathclaw was when I released one without knowing it at the Enclave Base... I'm kinda happy I was hiding at the moment and he didn't see me. It was freaking huge.

Well, just like the Fire Ants that are probably always going to be in that area for that quest, it would have been nice for Bethesda to have had, like those Fire Ants, a creature that was definitely in that area and found you...... because not meeting anything, for any reason, is a bummer for the start of the game, and only now, about 7 hours in, am I starting to get the Wasteland 'vibe' again. Would like to have had it for those 7 hours prior to now! :)

1. Check out the AntAgonizer waaay up north (just a little south of the town of Dave) she's a crazy biotch.
2. that deathclaw at the enclave base will not attack you, so no reason to hide.

So I got a new char and I ended up killing 2 Super Mutants at lvl 3 with a baseball bat while they wielded a Mini Gun and a Hunting Rifle.
One of them was a Super Mutant Brute and took a little longer to kill. But at normal difficulty, no VATS, and only losing about 50 hp... this is quite shameful, in my opinion. What the hell were the developers thinking!?!?
Btw, how the hell do you people keep track of all the locations? The map seems kinda murky to me...

there are two schools of thought concerning cats:
a. they are tastier than dogs
b. black bears mated with cats = ????? (yaoi guai?)
also if you want early detection, just up perception. but you have to pay attention to your compass and check for red every so often. =
current rating: 8/10 relative to fallout2 (which I would give 9/10).
yeah it is fun, and it is more realistic but fallout 2 was MORE fun....
I mean in some areas it was FLAT OUT SILLY (explosive outhouse? anyone?).
Fallout 3 is definitely more grim, and "real", and fun to play, but where is the hilarity? where are the lols? some parts are kinda funny but they don't have the comedy interspersed through the rampant cruel life that the characters led that fallout2 had.
If you've played fallout2, think about it some, and you'll come up with the conclusion that it was FUNNY. it really was! Fallout3 is not funny.

I was never playing Fallout because it was funny - in fact I liked much more grim Fallout 1 :D Yes, jokes were there, and when you thought about them, you found the world even more depressive... And that applies to Fallout 3 as well.
Add to UK_John & SkullCowboy discussion: I generally agree with SkullBoy, and I need to add: In Fallout 1 and 2, there was just a -chance- that something attacks you too. It didn't make the desert less desert-ish at all. Actually, it has done quite the conturary (I hope I spelled it right).
Fallout 3, first travel to Megaton without problems? Sure. Just to come out later and see for me one of the most depressing place in all Fallouts: School drowning in blood. And then, fighting for my life with bandits that attacked me outside.
Now, for something completely different: After playing around a little, I've discovered better implementation of radiation in Fallout 3 may be the first impression, but it seems completely wrong. Yes, in Fallout 1 and 2 you've never seen geier directly on your screen, but that doesn't mean it wasn't sitting in the background, laughing at your character, as he was becoming more and more irradiated. Effects of radiation in Fallout 3 seem a bit strange to me - you become irradiated, and your stats are instantly decreased. Nothing else happens. In old Fallouts, when you reached some point of irradiation, it took time for it to take effect - realistic. In case you weren't doing anything about it, damage to your body was even bigger - realistic. You didn't have your stats somehow decreased and then die on spot - death was long. And fracking painfull. I mean, almost every review was happy about how 'better' radiation in Fallout 3 is - in fact, it's done worse than in F1 or 2, AND it affects gameplay in almost the same way, you only need to take rad-away more often, which is not a problem, since it's lying everywhere.

I think you mean Yao Guai.
I don't even want to imagine Yaoi Guai.

Fire ant quest. Man. I hated it. Took me hours to finish, cost me most of my ammo and equipment. but the reward was sweet. and now I think it was very enjoyable one.
Radiation in Fallout 1 and 2. It never bothered me. I have never done anything with it. Ever.
I like it more in fallout 3. I actually care about it (to small degree. Got annoyed few times and just swam across the river (blood ties quest))

oh come on, you luled at that one. =P
mental image come on!

Sometimes Rule 34 is used for evil..evil gay pretty mutant bears..

There is wolf rain. not much different.
Shame I cannot draw. I have this picture in my head of super mutants wearing tuxedos hugging each other in romantic way.

Radiation is such a non-issue in F3. I probably have about 40 rad-aways and rad-x's that I barely use. So far the only place I've found radiation to actually be painful is at the one vault you have to visit for the main storyline, but even that can be completely avoided. I do wish there were more locations that were at least moderately irradiated that would force you to use rad-x and rad away at a higher level.
My new pet peeve is giant radscorpions... they're just annoying, they're like rats but take longer to die.

the poison glands fetch a pretty bottlecap.