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No, because there is obviously something wrong with the industry when two rigs explode within months of each other. Until they get their existing operations sorted out, it's logical to stop them adding new ones in more risky places.

Obviously? For such a huge industry, there have been surprisingly few disasters over the past 50 years.

Thank you sir.

Not a cave, but Lake Peigneur http://home.versatel.nl/the_sims/rig/lakepeigneur.htm

As you imply, the situation is pretty simple, and if anything good could come out of this event it will be a better appreciation for it:

~85 million barrels/day global production
~20 million barrels/day USA consumption
~7 million barrels/day USA production, in decline
~1.7 million barrels/day Gulf of Mexico production, in decline

Do the math. Can the US afford to stop offshore oil exploration? Pretty obviously not, unless there is a MAJOR investment in alternatives. And I don't mean the piddling little investments so far. I mean a major, "Manhattan Project" scale reorientation/investment. Whenever I hear people talk about alternatives I don't think they have a proper understanding of the scale of the problem. No, this isn't something that will be solved with biofuels -- not unless you reduce consumption in a major way and accept higher food costs. No, this can't all be solved with nuclear -- not unless you solve the waste storage issue or invest in new types of reactors. No, this can't all be solved by putting up solar panels and wind turbines -- unless you're willing to pay a lot more for energy, and accept huge areas covered with them (including your backyard). There are options here, but people don't understand what it will actually take to implement them. 20 million barrels/day is a lot of cheap energy, and the rest of the world wants theirs too and is willing to pay for it.

"One thing amazes me about the present fiasco is that we don't hear of more accidents like this, how many offshore oilrigs are there round the world? I guess the oil industry is either pretty careful or pretty lucky when it comes to oil extraction (or good on PR cover-ups...)"

You have part of it: the oil industry is pretty careful and these events are rare. For obvious reasons there are huge economic and other reasons to for oil companies to prevent these events from happening. But like a rare plane crash, despite safety measures they still happen. Why don't you hear about them much? The short answer is, people in the USA and their news organizations largely don't care if an oil well blowout is contaminating beaches elsewhere in the world. There is, however, plenty of reporting in the international press when these events happen, whether in the North Sea, off the coast of Australia, or Mexico.

One of the competitors, Versatel is now offering 20Mbps down, 1Mbps up for 39.95 Euros per month.

You ever tried burning a CD from Redmond? it is far better then crack! http://alem3d.obidos.org/i/horizon/horrov.gif
http://home.versatel.nl/animatieplaatjes/computer% 20aanval.gif

See this entry in the Google Weblog by Google employee Wei-Hwa Huang. It mentions that the best performers in the US Puzzle Championship go on to form part of the US team in the World Puzzle Championships; Wei-Hwa has been part of the US team for each of the past 12 years and won the whole World Championships in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 1999. It's fair to say that the conduit between impressive competitors in the championships and Google is pretty well-defined, to both parties' benefit - though, like you, I don't know of any Google employees who joined as a result of their participation.

If you're interested in the World Puzzle Championships, I blogged live from their finals day last year.

Chris Dickson (82nd out of 90, 2004 World Puzzle Championships)

Didn't stop the Allies.

ScienceNews article (2001) on Randomness of Pi's digits

Interesting work from Johan on Testing the a-periodic randomness of and comparing it with a Quantum Mechanical source.

But are the digits truely random ? In 1996, NERSC Chief Technologist David H. Bailey, together with Canadian mathematicians Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe, found a new formula for pi. This formula permits one to calculate the n-th binary or hexadecimal digits of pi, without having to calculate any of the preceding n-1 digits. This formula was discovered by a computer, using Bailey's implementation of Ferguson's PSLQ algorithm