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High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud
An anonymous reader writes "You might have laid Ethernet through some pretty aggressive environments, but how about through a 4-inch diameter steel pipe immersed in electrically conductive mud at pressures up to 1000 atmospheres, temperatures up to 150 deg C, and with vibrational accelerations of hundreds of g?
The Department of Energy has announced the invention of a system to allow data transmission up to 1 Mbit/s along drillpipe. That might not sound too fast, but the current technology uses some pretty neat electromechanical engineering to get ... 10 bits per second (on a good day). This will revolutionize the oil industry's ability to see where its wells are going and steer them into pockets of oil."
Visit it! Click on my whole post!
As many of our other editors know, and not as many of our readers may know, I, Spazntwich, am always looking for a good chance at attention whoring. I jumped on a chance for attention recently when I was offered a skirt to wear at school. "A skirt!!" you surely say. Yes, I, a male, wore a piece of women's clothing in a predominantly conservative and hyper-religious school. My review follows.
First off, I'd like to say that while I am a svelt 32 inch waist, it was nigh on impossible to find a skirt that would fit me properly. It didn't help matters that one of the only girls willing to lend me a skirt is... appetite challenged.
Despite the ill fit of the skirt (I was wearing the top of it around my waist, just so it would fit), I enjoyed wearing it immensely. I found that having on a skirt allowed me to show off my rather fetching legs quite well, a task even short shorts can't hope to accomplish.
In addition to showing off my beautiful exterior, the skirt brought out my inner beauty. While wearing it, I was filled with a sense of freedom that is all too absent when wearing something as restrictive as shorts and pants. It allowed me to speak with a flamingly gay lisp without any thought that what I was doing was absurd and embarassing, and also made me want to do nothing other than express my happiness.
On the negatives, the skirt has several. The first thing I noticed after wearing it for about 20 minutes was an intense itching around the area the skirt was contacting my skin. I believe this is simply the result of a poorly manufactured skirt and that a more carefully engineered skirt would be much more comfortable.
The second significant downside I experienced was a strange urge to talk constantly about myself, tell everyone secrets, gossip about my friends, primp in the bathroom for 2 hours before leaving to go anywhere, talk on my cell phone, and drive poorly. I'm not sure if there's any cure for these side affects.
So in short, I recommend skirt wearing for a limited period of time for any and all men who are comfortable in their masculinity. Wearing one is truly an eye-opening experience.
And yes, you sick bastards, I've got pictures, and yes, they will be posted soon.
Controll Group strikes back for all those sugar pills.
I'm a Linux sysadmin, the easiest way for me to fix this would be to make an 802.11 pedal powered network using Linux and use IRC to communicate over laptops.
sir bard
This is good because acording to George W. Bush the Oil companies just can't seem to get enough oil. Now they more efficiently rape the envirement.
Help I'm a rock.
fifth post! ablabla.org!
Controll Group strikes back for all those sugar pills.
Visit my site, you fucking cocksmokers! I are teh mastAr of trolls, and you are under my KONTROLL!!!!
Why not get high on the speedy service that subway delivers everyday? You get mouth watering veggies, succlent meats and cheeses, and fresh baked bread. treat your taste buds to a high-speed data transfer - of flavor!
While I think it's a pretty nifty thing to be able to do, all they are going to use if for is to get more oil so they can mess up the environment more... Now it would be interesting if they hooked this up so everyone in a nieghborhood could connect to each other through a mud connection :p.
Crapflooding is a scientifically proven way to get traffic drawn to my site. Click on this link. It links to www.ablabla.org, which is a wonderful and entertaining website. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
I read this as M.U.D. at first (Multi User Dungeon).
"While you drill for oil, you see a vibrant pixie nearby".
"Something is scribbled in the mud here.."
The message in the mud reads: /."
"high-speed network via M.U.D. is under construction; announce it on
Possible exits: Down, Up, Home
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
They talk about the problems suffered with sending electrical signals down wire surrounded by 'conductive mud' (known as 'mudwire' in the oil trade - it's often used to help those in the drill units under the earth to communicate with those above) but there is a simpler solution. Use something in the Ghz range, like 2.4Ghz wireless, for example.
The benefit of higher frequencies is that they travel in straight lines, and are less prone to interference from the outside. This is why 2.4Ghz wireless has become popular. 2.4Ghz was chosen for wireless networking because the frequency is the same as the resonance of trees and bricks, which means signals on that carrier wave can penetrate those objects leading to greater coverage.
The oil people would probably need to use a slightly lower frequency (for optimal use) to compensate for the lower density of the mudwire, but even 2.4Ghz would work. Simply make sure the antenna at the drill cage is secure, and then point a high powered (say 1MW) transmitter down towards the ground, and et voila.. you have wireless networking at 10Mbps.
I'm surprised a big networking company like Novell or nVidia hasn't jumped on to this and started to produce expensive proprietary gear for the rich oil companies to buy. Perhaps the time has now come.
Either way, wireless (radio) is the way to go when sending a signal through an electrically busy area. This is why wireless networking is popular in power stations, since fiber optics tend to suck up too much interference.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Well that's good news! They certainly need all the help they can get bringing us all that Texas Tea that we need to live fulfilling lives.
I can sleep easy now. Thanks, technology!
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL? The drill doesn't need all that bandwidth.... or perhaps it needs to fulfill its porn fill of the day? ;)
And "environmentally-friendly" coal.
And George *. Bush, for that matter.
Maybe eventually they can put that dust collecting above the ceiling tiles at our school to good use. I mean, the layer is about five inches thick.
Or, they could just use wifi...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Ayeka Muyou:
...
... I couldn't be certain how long, perhaps minutes,
...
...
... he's your nephew. The Emperor." Another ... and the weight of galactic opinion would be on
... who are you, exactly."
..."
... why did you abandon that duty to come get me?" I asked,
... I come all this
... he still cares about you ..."
... because we were rivals for his
..." she trailed off. "Uh. Well, ... we can't. No biggy. I can handle
... modest, but it didn't really bother me all that much. I decided to
... then paused. "Where will you
...
..." she muttered in her sleep. I blushed. She was
... atashi no Tenchi ... daisuki yo ..." she whispered.
... you
... "
... your name, when I said ..."
..." She shook her head violently ... it was a mistake, don't worry about
... too many years of bad memories," she managed to make out.
... no, were engaging in a dance
...
... you're a ..." she
... you think that I ... oh, Guide, this
...
... a clone possessing all her physical ... that was much more to my taste."
...
...
..." I whispered.
..." she was finally starting to break down. Tenchi lifted ... then realized the impossibility of it.
..." he said ... then shook his head. A moment
... but I think that you did
... to get someone killed ..." I would not let the tears
... hell, I thought she *was* you, but now I find out that she was all but
... lesbian.
A Tale of Ayeka and Ryouko
The first thing I learned, when I awoke, was pain. My lungs were
on fire, my skin was frozen, every muscle seemed to aching, and it was far
too bright to open my eyes more than a slit. I wanted to curl up in a
ball and quietly die.
"Ayeka. Ayeka, come on. We don't have time for this. They're
going to come for us, and we gotta get out of here before they get here."
The voice was harsh, but it did not seem angry, as such. More
concerned.
I forced my eyes to open, gasping in pain, and stared up into the
golden ones that were glaring at me. I tried to speak, but all that I
could manage was a hacking cough as the liquid in my throat forced its
way up.
"Are you able to walk, or am I gonna have to *carry* you out of
here like some mewling infant?" the voice, which I knew had to belong to
the eyes, demanded. I knew, from the tone, that the speaker was expecting
me to insist that I was able to walk. I tried to push myself up from the
ground, and my arms gave out as soon as I tried to put my weight on them.
Something at my back kept me from collapsing all the way down, however. I
shook my head to show that I couldn't walk.
The eyes closed, and a profound sigh ensued. "Damn spoiled brat
princess," the voice muttered. "All right."
The pressure on my back increased, and I felt a new pressure
sliding underneath my knees. Then my body left the ground completely. I
found my head resting against something soft, and I closed my eyes
completely.
Then there was a whooshing noise, and I heard the voice mutter a
short expression that I couldn't understand. What followed it, however,
was very clear. "ESCAPE!" another voice, angry, bellowed, making me wince
and curl up even more.
"Time to go!" the voice proclaimed, and in an instant we were
moving at great speed. I heard several things breaking in the wake of our
passage, heard alarms going off, screams.
The arms that were holding me were very strong, much stronger than
I was. I knew that no matter how fast we were moving, no matter how many
twists there were in our course, that the person who was holding me
wouldn't let go. I was safe. I didn't know how I knew that, but I knew
that I was safe with this person.
After a while
perhaps an hour, the voice spoke again. "Okay, this should be good." The
bright light beyond my eyelids had dimmed, and I opened them again as we
slowed to a stop.
We were within a cave of some sort, and the darkness that allowed
me to open my eyes also kept me from making out many details. We were
moving slowly downward, and I heard the crunch of a footfall. Then I was
being lowered even further, placed down on the ground.
And I finally got a look at the person who had rescued me.
She was tall, with (as I had realized) golden eyes and long, spiky
light blue hair, that flowed down to her waist, with two long locks that
dangled past her ears. There was something exotic about her features,
something that I couldn't quite understand, given that her face was no
more nor any less unfamiliar to me than my own. She was dressed in a
tight-fitting uniform of some sort.
"Okay," she said, "we can rest here for a while. Not for a *long*
while, but for a few hours." She took a deep breath. "So, you wanna tell
me what all happened?"
My lungs no longer felt like they were on fire, and my throat was
no longer filled with liquid. Still, I hesitated before I spoke. I was
not sure how she would take my reply.
"I would gladly explain all I remember," I said, slowly, "if you
will but tell me two things."
"Shoot," she said.
"Who are you? And, for that matter, who am I?"
She stared at me, unblinking for a moment. "Excuse me?"
"The first thing that I recall is waking up, in extreme pain
back there," I indicated, vaguely gesturing. "I cannot remember anything
before that --"
"Ah, *shit*," she said angrily. "They've doped you up with
Oblivio!"
I nodded. Given that I had no idea what she was talking about,
she seemed so certain that it convinced me.
She turned away, tapping her foot anxiously, thinking about
something. Her legs were very long, I noticed, and the uniform she wore
emphasized their smooth muscles.
"Okay," she said suddenly, "here's the scoop. Your name is Ayeka
Masaki. You are a princess of the Jurai Star Kingdom, the aunt of the
ruler of that Kingdom, and the ambassador to one of its few allies. A
week or so ago, while you were taking a vacation to the planet Mars, you
were kidnapped. The Imperial Security Agency immediately started to
investigate, and they determined fairly shortly that the men who had
taken you were in the employ of a certain Duke , who had been courting
your hand in marriage for a few years a while back, before you finally
told him to get bent. Anyway, this same Duke, about two weeks ago,
seceeded from the Kingdom. Some of the nobles in this sector do that on
the average of about twice a year, but the fact that he'd done so just
before you were seized was a big indicator that he was responsible.
Unfortunately, this tied Tenchi's hands."
"Tenchi?" I asked. "Who is Tenchi?"
She seemed to be rocked by the question. After a moment, she
replied, unsteadily. "He
moment, in which she seemed to be collecting herself, followed. "Anyway,
like I said, the fact that Duke Jorashi has seceeded from the Empire tied
Tenchi's hands. He could send in the whole damn fleet to get you out of
here, but it would be an act of war against an independant power. It'd
give all the other currently seceeded nobles an excuse to unite against
the Empire, and fighting *them* would give the Empire's *other* opponents
an excuse to invade
their side.
"So," she continued, "I volunteered to go in and rescue you
myself." She avoided meeting my eyes when she said that.
"And
"I'm Ryouko Ma-- just Ryouko. I'm Tenchi's bodyguard
"Then
confused. "Surely protecting someone as important as the Emperor is more
vital than rescuing one of his aunts."
She glared at me. "Typical, Ayeka, typical
way to do you a favor and --"
"Are we friends, then?" I eagerly pressed. "Or --"
"No," she said shortly, "we are *not* friends." She looked away
again. "But Tenchi
`Still'?
"... and I can't stand to see him upset or worried. I never
could."
With lacerating clarity, it came to me. "You love him, don't
you?"
She flinched, but still did not look at me.
"You and I were never friends
heart, weren't we?" I continued, sadly. "And you won --"
"No," she said shortly. "Neither of us won."
"But then --"
She turned to look at me with an impatient expression. "Look, I
don't have time to go into all the reasons you usually hate my guts. Back
to the situation at hand. I slipped past Duke Jorashi's defenses easy
and found out where you were. For some reason, he'd stashed you in
coldsleep. I broke you out of the tank you were in, and now I find out
that he also pumped you full of enough drugs to give you complete amnesia.
Great. So you don't have the ability to help me in our escape."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't make ex... cu... ses
it's not all your fault. It'd be nice if we could use your powers as well
as mine to get out of here, but
it."
"I'm sure you can."
She looked at me oddly, then shook her head. "Okay. We're far
enough away from their headquarters that we can take a few hours to rest.
I'm *so* sorry that I couldn't bring a change of clothes for you --"
I looked down and realized that I was naked. I wondered why she
thought I'd be bothered by it. Perhaps when I had my memories I'd be more
sit up, and covered my nipples and vulva, in case they were bothering her.
"-- but I *did* bring a blanket so you won't freeze your skinny
little butt off." She produced a small package from her belt, and it
unfolded into a large blanket, which she flung at me. I caught it, and
began to wrap it around myself. "Right. Try to get some rest, but don't
sleep too soundly."
I nodded, and began to lay down
be?"
"Huh? I'm not going anywhere."
"No, I mean, where are you going to sleep?"
She shook her head. "I'm fine. I'll keep watch."
I laid down. It was a warm blanket, and I had carefully wrapped
it around me to protect myself from the hard floor of the cave. Still, I
could not make a headrest out of it, so I was doomed to sleep uneasily.
Before I nodded off, I heard her yawning. "Are you sure that you
don't --" I asked.
"I'm fine, I told you. Don't worry your pretty little head over
me." There was a faint hint of anger in her tone.
I sighed, and closed my eyes again. Just before sleep took me, I
found myself wondering if she truly thought that I was pretty.
* * *
I awoke from my dreamless sleep an immeasurable time later, to the
faint sound of snoring. A brief flash of irritation consumed me, but it
fell away as I saw her, curled up in a ball a little ways away.
I knew that she was cold, somehow.
So I stood up, still swathed in the blanket, and went over to her.
It was not that hard to spread the blanket over both of us, and curl up
behind her. She was not very warm, and the floor was hard
But it felt good.
"T'nchi
obviously having some sort of dream about the one that she said that we
had both loved, and lost.
She began to twist around beneath the blanket. For a moment, I
believed that she was trying to steal more of it for herself, and I
resisted, pulling it so that she couldn't do so. That was when she rolled
over from where she was lying on her left side to lying on her right.
Facing me.
Our lips were only an inch apart.
"Tenchi
Words in a language I couldn't understand. And then she leaned forward
and she was kissing me.
Her tongue moved inside my mouth, caressing my teeth for a moment.
Slowly, I reached out with my own tongue to brush against hers.
Then her eyes opened a fraction.
And *then* they opened all the way.
She jerked back, spluttering. "Uh. Uh. I. Er." A deep breath.
"Wotinsamhilld'youthinkyou're DOING?"
I swallowed, still feeling her tongue in my mouth. "I
fell asleep, and you looked cold, and so I came over with the blanket and
you were dreaming and --"
"Oh," she said, backing further away, out from under the blanket.
"Well, that's okay then, all my fault, terribly sorry, don't do that ever
again, I mean I'm not cold, I can take interstellar temperatures for
crying out loud, of course I'm not cold --"
"Why are you running away from me?" I asked quietly.
She visibly shuddered. "Be-because I
I let the blanket drop to my waist. "Do you find me disgusting?
Is that why --"
"No! I mean, hell, it's nothing I haven't seen before, well a
couple times, and besides I'm a lot better built, so --"
"When you were sleeping," I continued, "you said a word. Daisuki.
What does it mean?"
She was silent for a long moment, and for a second I imagined that
I saw a single perfect tear trickling down her cheek. "It means love. In
Tenchi's native language." She was silent for another moment. "Did. Did
I say
I shook my head. "You spoke of Tenchi."
She closed her eyes, and smiled a sad, quiet smile. "Of course.
The one time I was with him, he spoke of someone else like that."
"Of the one who did win him?" I asked.
"No. Of someone we all lost
again. "It doesn't matter. It's
it."
I stood up, letting the blanket pool about my feet. "I want to
worry about it," I answered her quietly. "Why were we never friends, even
after we had both lost?"
There was something of a cornered animal in her eyes. "Because
Slowly, ever so slowly, I stepped close to her. Every step
brought me a little closer. Finally, I was standing with my breasts
against hers, staring deeply into her eyes. "I don't have any memories,"
I said, and kissed her again.
This time, my tongue moved into her mouth. I was startled but not
truly surprised to find her sharp teeth. In the short while that I'd
known her, I had always sensed something of a wild beast in her.
I hoped that the wild beast would be wild for me.
There was a momentary pulse and she was naked against me. I
pulled back, startled. "How --"
Her eyes were on fire. "A simple trick," she murmured and kissed
me again. Now our tongues were duelling
complex beyond imagination.
Before I knew what was happening, she was pulling me too the floor
of the cave with her. "Wait," I said, "the blank--"
"I don't want to wait," she said, and kissed my left nipple. That
made my mind, which was exploding from the sensations of her touching my
skin everywhere else, detonate in a whole new fashion. I didn't even feel
the grit of the cavern floor pushing into my back. I was too far gone
from her fingers, from her lips, from her
And then one of her fingers moved down to brush against my vulva,
and she paused. Her eyes were wide. "You are
whispered. I nodded.
She bent down and began to kiss me there. It was beyond
imagining. And then after a moment, she looked up at me. She met my
eyes.
She pushed her fingers in.
It hurt, a little.
But what came after made the hurt fade into a distant memory, and
I gasped and cried and in the end I screamed as she gave me the gift.
And what I screamed was her name.
We kissed again, and then I decided to give her my gift --
"Well isn't that cute?"
Her head whipped around, and too late I saw them standing there.
Hard faces, twisted in amusement and contempt. With weapons pointed at
us.
She could destroy them, I knew. But while she was destroying
them, they could slay me.
And she could not let that happen. She lowered her glowing hand,
and the glow around it faded. "All right," she said quietly, "you win."
Her clothes reappeared around her as she snatched the blanket and flung it
around my shoulders. "We'll come peacefully, won't we, Ayeka --"
She stared, baffled, as the squad leader laughed viciously. "Sure
you will. Right. After you put these on," he added, and tossed a set of
bracelets to her. She looked at them, shook her head -- more in annoyance
than in anger -- and clicked them on. She was looking right at me when
she did so, and she winked.
We were marched through the caverns for what felt like hours. My
feet were bruised and bleeding within minutes, but whenever I stumbled she
was there to catch me.
At last we came to an door in the wall, through which we were
pushed. The lights came on a moment after we were inside and the door
closed.
A cold eyed man with slate gray hair was seated on a throne inside
an almost palatial suite. He smiled cruelly at us. "Well, the rumors are
correct, then. His Imperial Mongrel sent his official pirate to spy on
us, and to steal my property.
"Go consort with goats, your Grace," she said, sneering.
"Now where would be the amusement in that?"
"They suit you more than Ayeka ever will," she hissed.
He blinked, as though she had said something he hadn't expected,
then laughed uproarously. "You
*is* amusing!"
"Huh?"
"Lady Ryouko," he asked, drawing out every syllable of her name,
"do you actually think that I would keep such a prize as Princess Ayeka in
cold sleep, where all I can do is look at her charms?"
He tapped a button on the side of his throne, and a section of the
wall to his left slid open, revealing a clear, glass wall. Behind the
wall was a young woman with purply black hair, tied back into a pair of
pony tails, dressed in a formal kimono. She had an outraged expression on
her face, and she looked as though she were about to start pounding on the
glass
And then her eyes met mine, and the young woman froze.
She looked back and forth between me and the young woman with a
terribly confused expression. I couldn't understand why.
"Ayeka?" she finally murmured while gazing at the young woman.
"Given the remarkable potency of the power of Jurai that runs
through the Crown Princess' veins, I would have been fool indeed to
attempt to force myself on her. She would probably have annihilated me.
But a clone of the Princess
qualities without the annoying power
I gazed at the back of her head, for she was staring at the Duke.
I whispered her name.
"And while the clone was being grown, I decided to make some
modifications. A female who cannot enjoy what is being done to her, for
the simple fact that she is biologically oriented towards other women
I have always yearned to rape such a one. 'Tis a dream of mine."
"You son of a bitch," she said in an extremely quiet tone.
He looked speculative. "As I recall, yes, I am. Now then. You
stand accused of trespassing on my property. How do you plead?"
"You're gonna die, you sick fuck," she said in the same tone.
"I'll interpret that as guilty. Therefore, we sentence you to
death. Executioner!"
I turned to see the leader of the guards step forward, carrying a
heavy beam rifle of some kind. Behind me, she lifted a clenched fist and
began to concentrate.
Nothing happened.
"It wasn't easy to build a set of restraints calibrated to your
power level, you know," the Duke commented offhandedly. "But it's worth
every credit."
The beam rifle in the guard's hand began to hum with power, and he
leveled it at her.
At my
In the instant that the weapon flashed, I stepped between her and
it.
I learned more about pain in that moment, and then I collapsed. I
did not scream.
She did though. She screamed what she had thought was my name,
and dropped down to grab me. She was all but incoherent, and I was in too
much pain to say anything. But one thing I did say as the darkness rushed
upon me.
"Dai... daisuki
The first thing I learned, when I awoke, was pain.
The last thing I learned, as I died, was love.
Epilogue.
AYEKA:
I felt a sudden stab of pity as I saw Ryouko bending over the body
of my clone, sobbing as intensely as she had when Tenchi had announced
that he was to marry her mother.
I didn't understand *why* she was carrying on like that, though.
"Abominable marksmanship," Duke Jorashi said shortly to the
guard. "Well, here's your second chance. Don't miss this time."
"Don't even *think* about it," Tenchi's voice snapped.
Almost involuntarily, my head turned from where it was gazing.
Tenchi, his moustache resting over a flat, angry mouth, was standing only
a few feet behind where Ryouko was. I gasped.
"How dare you!" Duke Jorashi shrieked. "This is an act of war,
oh Emperor!"
"Oh?" Tenchi replied. "Then what about this? Screen."
A holographic screen, like the one Washuu uses, appeared beside
him. The image of Duke Jorashi was on it, with a look of contrition on
his face. "Lord Emperor Tenchi, I most humbly recant my recent secession,
and regret deeply our dispute. I further invite you to visit my world at
your earliest convenience, that we might discuss certain strategic
matters."
"That is a lie!" the Duke shouted. "A fabrication!"
"You'll have plenty of time to try and prove that at your trial
for kidnapping. Ryouko --"
"Trial?"
Ryouko's voice was more quiet than I'd ever heard it, even on the
horrid day nearly a thousand years ago when she'd thought that she'd lost
Tenchi forever, to Kagato. In her eyes was a new level of berserk fury.
I stepped away from the glass, and began to build my personal forcefield
up to maximum.
"HE DIES NOW!" she screamed as she raced towards the Duke. The
restrainer bands shattered and fragmented as she drew on more power than
she'd ever pulled before. Her sword manifested, and the glass wall before
me shattered from the backlash of the power.
In the twinkling of an eye, Tenchi was standing between her and
the Duke. "NO," he said in his most authoritative tone.
"LET ME PAST, TENCHI! HE IS MINE!" she screamed, swinging a fist
through his head. Immediately, I realized that he was here only as a
holographic projection.
"No, Ryouko! If you kill him now, you're a murderer. We're going
to use the system this time!"
"HE --"
"I know what he did! And I'm *sorry*. But this is the way it has
to be!"
"He
his arms to try to embrace her
"I'm sorry," he said again. Then he turned to glare at the Duke,
who was cowering behind his throne. "But rest assured, your Grace, that
Imperial justice will be *very* swift in your case."
The Duke was too terrified to say a word. There was a faint hint
of urine in the air.
"Ayeka," he turned at last to me, "are you all right?"
"I am quite fine, Tenchi. That craven never dared to lay a finger
on me."
"All right. I'll be down in a shuttle very shortly." He turned
to look at Ryouko, who had once more bent over the body of my clone. He
closed his eyes. "I wish
later the hologram dissolved.
I stepped gingerly out past the wreckage of the wall, just as
Ryouko lifted the clone's corpse up, wrapping it in what remained of the
blanket she'd been wearing, and began to slowly walk towards the door
leading out of the Duke's bunker. "Ryouko?" I asked, startled. "Where
are you --"
"I have a grave to dig," she softly answered, and teleported away.
And I wondered.
RYOUKO:
I spent the entire trip home in bed, locked in my cabin on the
throneship. No one, not even "Mom", who had come to help with the phony
broadcast from the Bastard, was foolish enough to intrude on me, until the
day before we were to arrive back on Jurai.
The door to my cabin swished open. Of course, only one person on
the ship had the authority to enter any room on the ship. I stayed where
I was, waiting for him to start chastising me.
Finally, the silence became overpowering, and I spoke. "I was
wrong. I shouldn't have --"
"I didn't come here to argue with you
the right voice.
Her voice was so much like *hers*, but there were a double handful
of differences in the way that she spoke. So my heart only stopped
beating for a second. I rolled over to look at her. She was standing,
elegant as always, near the door. And I wondered, as our eyes met,
whether I would always remember *her* taste whenever I looked at her.
"I came," she said slowly, "to thank you for what you tried to do.
For invading Jorashi's homeworld to rescue me, without Tenchi's
permission, so that he could avoid a war. I am grateful, Ryouko."
I looked away. "I didn't do anything. I barged in head first and
managed to get
come again. I *would* not.
"And I grieve for your loss," she said.
"What loss," I choked. "I was dumb enough to fall for someone who
*programmed* to fall for me. Something as stupid as that doesn't deserve
to be called a loss."
There was silence for a moment.
"I will say only this, Ryouko. Duke Jorashi had to make changes
to her biology, to make my clone a
"But not many."
I whipped around and stared at her standing in the doorway, not
looking at me. "What?" I hissed.
"Do you know what frightened me the most when you raided Jurai?
Not the damage you caused. Not Yoshou running after you. But one very
simple thing. It frightened me that someone so beautiful could be so
vile."
She stepped out of the door, and it closed behind her.
And I wondered.
"AYEKA":
I paused as I walked towards the light, and saw my beloved's heart
beginning to heal. And smiled. "She's going to be all right, isn't she?"
I asked the Presence who walked with me, holding my hand.
OF COURSE.
We began walking again.
Author's Notes
The characters of Tenchi Muyou were created by Hiroki Hayashi and
Masaki Kajishima, and brought to North America by Pioneer LDC. This
story, while incorporating aspects of this motion picture held under
copyright by others, is copyright 1997 by Chris Davies.
Nobody sue me, okay?
Chris Davies, Advocate for Darkness, Part-Time Champion of Light.
"Damn it all, how am I supposed to sit here and wallow in self-pity and
disgust with all this racket going on?" -- Yuusaku Godai, Maison Ikkoku.
Hey, if you used that mud as a 802.11b antenna or something, you would be WARMUDSLINGING!
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
"This is why 2.4Ghz wireless has become popular. 2.4Ghz was chosen for wireless networking because the frequency is the same as the resonance of trees and bricks, which means signals on that carrier wave can penetrate those objects leading to greater coverage."
Resonant materials stop the signal in it's tracks.
2.4 GHZ is almost useless at penetrating brick and trees. It requires true line of sight. 900Mhz is far better at penetrating these things than 2.4Ghz is.
Dense wood full of water (trees) or brick / concrete walls are the enemy of 2.4Ghz.
2.4Ghz was chosen because the band was there, and the higher frequency allowed greater data transmission than 900Mhz. For penetration of our everyday living space, 2.4Ghz is relatively shitty.
data transfer over mud isn't new. The best oilfield services companies have been doing it for quite some time.
As for why they need to get data out, consider that when you're looking for oil, you need to figure out what the EXACT geological formations look like (in 3 dimensions) a mile or 2 underneath the surface of the earth. The more data you can get out of a hole about any number of factors (rock hardness, resistivity, etc...) at a known depth, the better your odds are of figuring out what's down there in the main.
Dojo: defanging browsers so you don't have to
So does that trolling hook hurt when you bite it?
(Those rig workers are going to need to be careful with that 1 megawatt transmitter in the 2GHz range.)
I'm just wondering if I was the only person who first thought the article had something to do with Multiusr Dungeons(online games).
I took that hook, line, and sinker, eh?
I'm not fully awake yet. Argh.
say miners are trapped in a tunnel a distance from the surface.
drilling out an escape tunnel you would want to know the condidtion of the rock you are going through so you dont make their situation worse or cause a cave in.
I've had to put Cat5 through sales and marketing cubes!
Much easier communication than the old "pulsed-bullshit" telemetry, though.
Jouster
hurrah, 1mbit is worthy of a slashdotting, on three...
....cried. Personally, I think this is great, but I know some who wouldn't like this.
-Valiss
But is it backhoe proof? Then I'll be impressed.
Stupid contractors keep cutting through damn cables in my area.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
For more than 60 years, engineers have struggled with the problem of a drill pipe connection, or "tool joint," that would stand up to the wear and tear of increasingly hostile downhole drilling conditions, yet provide reliable electrical connections every 30 feet over thousands of feet of pipe penetrating deep into some of nature's harshest environments. [...]
But the excruciatingly slow pace of mud pulse telemetry - 3 to 10 bits per second - often meant that data resolution was so poor that the driller could not make crucial decisions in real time. Often, time-consuming operations would be required to retrieve the downhole data or drilling would have to stop while other procedures were employed to confirm the low-resolution data pulsed to the surface.
And there is this link, complete with pretty graphics, from the company that actually developed the technology
http://www.grantprideco.com/gptechnologies/Intelli Pipe.asp
have fun
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"I run my drill on Linux! There's a public-domain webserver where you can view the realtime stats!"
/.'ed drillpipe.
Ugh,
Jouster
I seem to remember M.U.D. as standing for "Multi-User-Door"? Games on BBS's were called door games. Were there two meanings, or is this the same as the unknown origin of BNC?
Bravo.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
no more need to declare war on them,
except pure spite, of course
Check out Schlumberger www.slb.com. They're the 800 lb gorilla of the oilfield services industry. Their original solution to finding what was going on at the other end of a drilling rig was to simply pulse mud. Switch it on and off and measure the changes in this signal on the end of the drilling rig. When drilling a rig mud is used to stabilize the walls of the shaft . The advantage of this technique is this... No circular conductor built into the pipe means it can be adapted easily to old equipment and its cheaper. This new system described will eventually make its gains... but its gonna be a while... I saw someone mention wireless... Totally unfriendly environment and there is WAY to much noise, not to mention these holes are so deep you're not going to penetrate all the way back up the hole to the rig on the surface. Anyway... that's a really basic description of what the old new and a couple considerations are in the industry... Look up Schlumberger for a little more info... or Halliburton...
The Devil gets ethernet. (you know he'll be on AOL)
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
it's nice to see the government of the USA to finally be doing something useful for these poor, technologically limited oil companies. I'm sure they will redirect their profits gained from this technology RIGHT BACK to us citizens, eh? thanks, DOE.
it's often used to help those in the drill units under the earth to communicate with those above)
- I'm not even bothering with this one...
The benefit of higher frequencies is that they travel in straight lines
- This is apposed to, say, those low frequency waves that like to travel at right angles, right?
This is why 2.4Ghz wireless has become popular. 2.4Ghz was chosen for wireless networking because the frequency is the same as the resonance of trees and bricks,
- Lovely thought. So you're saying all our forests are going to turn into the Tacoma Narrows Bridge? After all, that is what happens when you hit an objects resonate frequency.
antenna at the drill cage is secure, and then point a high powered (say 1MW) transmitter down towards the ground, and et voila..
- Hrmmm, metallic cages... hmmm, Faraday Cages. Yup, that'll help signal reception!
- 1 mw is high power you say? Damn, my old brick cellphone should be able to reach Istanbul!
I'm surprised a big networking company like Novell or nVidia hasn't jumped on to this and started to produce expensive proprietary gear for the rich oil companies to buy
- nVidia is doing networks now? Won't they be surprised! Man, ATI will be ticked.
Either way, wireless (radio) is the way to go when sending a signal through an electrically busy area. This is why wireless networking is popular in power stations, since fiber optics tend to suck up too much interference.
- Hahhaa, I'm just laughing to hard at this one.
You know, if you are going to troll, at least make it plausible.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
AKRON, Ohio (APBnews.com) -- For seven years, she's maintained her innocence, insisting that she did not brutally sodomize her 7-year-old son, injuring him so badly that doctors considered removing part of his bowel.
It was the family dog, Bugsy the pit bull, that raped the boy, she said. Now, the woman, who is serving a life sentence in an Ohio prison for felonious penetration, may get a shot at freedom, after her son, who has remained silent for seven years, testified in court Tuesday that the woman's story is true.
'My mother is innocent,' Michael Sims told a judge in Summit County, according to court officials.
PUSH FOR NEW TRIAL
The boy's shocking testimony came as the woman's lawyer, University of Akron law professor Dean Carro, launched a campaign to win a new trial for the woman.
The boy's testimony, say those familiar with the case, may be the kind of new evidence that the defense needs to reopen the case. Under Ohio law, a case like this can only be reopened if new evidence surfaces that was not available in the past.
But it's also forcing prosecutors, police, Carro and the boy himself -- who was traumatized by the incident -- to revisit the lurid details of a case that shocked this Ohio community when it was first reported in 1993.
DOCTORS SUSPECTED CHILD ABUSE
The case began on a night in November of that year when the mother, then 40, brought her son to the emergency room at Children's Hospital Medical Center of Akron. The boy was covered in feces, and his rectum was badly torn. Doctors immediately suspected child abuse.
The woman, whose name is being withheld to protect the identity of her son, told authorities at the time that she had been soaking in a tub when she heard her son whimpering outside the bathroom door, say sources familiar with the case.
The injured boy told her that he had been desperately trying to make it to the bathroom before he had an accident, that he had pulled down his pants, and that Bugsy, a 70-pound pit bull had attacked him, penetrating him, officials say.
Prosecutors and police didn't buy the tale. They charged the woman with felonious sexual penetration and endangering a child.
Even after the dog's semen was found in the boy's rectum, they maintained that the woman had sexually assaulted the boy, sodomizing him with a hard object like a pool cue or a broomstick as punishment for soiling his pants.
BOY TOO YOUNG TO TESTIFY
But authorities never located an object that could have been used in the attack. They speculated in court during the woman's trial that she had collected the dog's semen and inserted it, possibly using a turkey baster or a semen-filled bag and a straw, to cover her crime. No physical evidence was ever found to support that theory, sources familiar with the case say.
But in court, there was no one to support the woman's story. The boy, who at 7 was considered incompetent to testify, didn't speak on his mother's behalf. Ohio law sets the age of competence at 10. Instead, prosecutors called a social worker, who testified that the boy had told her his mother hurt him. The defense now says the boy said what he thought the adults wanted to hear.
That was enough for the jury to convict the woman. She was sentenced to life in prison.
IS TESTIMONY NEW EVIDENCE?
Recently, however, the boy, who now lives in suburban Cleveland with his father, began to revisit the incident. He came forward and agreed to testify on his mother's behalf. It's now up to the judge to decide whether the boy's testimony is enough to warrant a new trial, authorities said.
The question the judge has to decide is not whether the boy's statement is true, but whether it meets the legal criteria as new evidence.
Why bother making pipes and wells smarter when we can just beat up Iraq and take their oil instead?
comrade Anonymous!
Now, all they need is XML over HTTP over IPSEC to talk with the devices. We all know that new technology is nothing without proven standards.
</RANT>
Whoa, what a coincidence. I read this story and then I heard an interview with the people actually producing this hardware on the radio. I have digital radio so I recorded it and put it on my site as a 16kbps MP3. It's only 160k. Here you go:
http://www.boog.co.uk/media/wireless-oil.mp3
mogorific carpentry experiments
Now the metaphora comes to reality:
Hey, get of your chair and go check that mudpit over there, we are been having some blackouts for the last five minutes...
Than them.
This is awesome, I am going to the office in waders and I am going to start packing in mud,pipes, and oil through the new HR department!
/.!
I am going to get away with it because I will link this article in an email to engineering discussing how this will avoid the plenum/firecode problem with UTP. I will send a second email to accounting discussing the massive ROI on using mud over expensive cabling projects.
The the only part that will be better than watching their email open for two hours will be watching them cry about having to process my raise and promotion! This is the first Monday I have looked forward to in a LONG time, THANKS
People have so much confidence in them that they're now a penny stock... Friday's trades
It's nothing but a bitter left wing bastion of premium porn (how they stay on-line) Salon Porn - um - I mean erotica
Kinda all goes together 'eh? Bush bashing, Demos and Porn?
How do you lay Ethernet? It's a frigging protocol.
to introduce you to her.
Maybe take her to a movie and dinner....
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
While I'm ranting. If western nations had have spent some of the money they used to design and build weapons to protect foriegn oil interests on renewable energy solutions instead; couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
When will we have webcams on the drill bits?
Why is it all the whacko enviro greeny extremists seem to think that everything is an either/or proposition?
As if the DOE had a budget of X dollars and was required to spend all of X on drilling tech or all of X on alternative fuels tech.
The reality is that the budget is just that... a budget. Some money goes to oil tech, some money goes to a variety of alternative energy tech, and the rest goes into the vast sink hole of spending that is the federal beaurocracy.
Thank you for reading this far into my diatribe about the stupid and ignorant people of the world and how they managed to get on the net.
Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL?
Well, for starters you could put an array of accoustic, microwave, or electrical transmitters & sensors in the pipe just BEHIND the drill and image the region ahead of the drill with radar and/or sonar. If you see a pocket of something that sounds/conducts/reflects like oil a bit off to one side, you can adjust the drill to curve in that direction (or send the NEXT one over that way).
10 BPS just doesn't cut it for uploading imaging information, even if you put most of the fancy processing down with the sensore. But T1 rates are just fine.
There's lots of other stuff you want to monitor - temperature, pressure, conductivity, etc. to find out what sort of stuff you're drilling through.
And it's important to know when to give up, stop pouring money down THIS hole and start over somewhere else. It costs a LOT to run the rig long enough to drill even another foot...
I recall, back in the early days, a company in Ann Arbor made a little board with a CMOS Z80-clone, a ROM with a BASIC interpreter, a serial port, and a few I/O ports - including some analog inputs. They sold a LOT of 'em to an oil company.
Seems that every now and then they would pull up the drill and send one of these down to measure some stuff. Then they would send the drill down behind it and grind it up. It was cheaper to buy a new one (and the associated cable) each time than to leave the rig idle long enough to pull the old one up. (And considering how fast a winch can crank, and how much custom computer stuff cost back in those days, that will tell you a lot about the per-minute cost of an oil rig and drilling team.)
So imagine how much they can save if they don't need to pull the DRILL up - disassembling it as they go - then reverse the whole process to put it back down, every time they want to take another reading.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm a XP .NET sysadmin and the easiest solution for your problem is to install Windows XP .NET Advanced Server and use Microsoft's .NET reliabililty along with passport authentication. Using this and MSN messenger you can create a 5th dimension vortex of communication using vortex32.dll. Running MSN messenger over this creates an easy to use solution with only 1 degree of seperation.
Thank you.
Imagine a beowolf cluster interconnected with mud!
It's wonderful that the DOE pays for networking for needy companies. Is the DOE also going to fund my upgrade to 802.11a? I really need something faster than I have right now.
In one fell swoop, every citizen in the entire country of Elbonia would suddenly have broadband access... if only they had computers.
~Philly
"My modem is slower than mud"...
"The IntelliPipe is one of the most remarkable advances in drilling technology in the last 25 years," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. "President Bush, in the National Energy Policy, directed me to pursue advanced technology in energy production. I think the IntelliPipe is exactly the type of technology we need to move our domestic production capabilities into the next century."
That sounds like it's fresh out from the TV shop.
The western nations spent as much money on weapons as they thought was neccessary, combined with personal greed and kickbacks. Western Nations feared being conquered by the USSR and communism. Ask an oversimplified questiong, get an oversimplified answer.
As I was waiting for the link to load, I was guessing how this might be accomplished.....Pretty cool solution to this problem. The non-contact electrical connection was the most innovative thing about this. Looks like it uses an inductive ring at either end of the pipe to pass the signal.
With a little rework, existing pipes could be make to be "intelligent" like this too. You could, for instance, drop a small inductive "washer" at each of the joints and drop the cable in through the pipe. You'd only need to drill a small hole at each end of the pipe to make the connection between the washer and cable inside. I know that this is over-simplifying the situation, but my guess is that existing pipes could be reworked for perhaps $200 per segment in quantity.
Now that the bandwidth is available, these same engineers are now working on porn and MP3 players for the drill bits to suck that up.
you drive a car?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
.. my friends and I play quake that is networking through my septic's leech field.
So what if it smells like shit and it's outside, it's still better than routing all those pesky cat 5 cables.
I'll admit that sometimes we get some bad throughput so we have to feed Big Joe some beans to get the system going again.
Live web cams
first they are the source of oil, and now, I reckon they have more mud than any of us, and could hold the world to ransom[1]![2]
[1] insert evil cackle
[2] i have not researched this, but i know for a fact my house isnt made of much mud
Or will they still have to go to war? We need Mr Burns' Slantwise Drilling Company!
Mudcam.
Look for it soon, only $1 a minute in streaming video.
Written transcript: Black, black, brown, gray, black, brown...
Say something slightly negative about oil companies, and get moderated as "flamebait".... who gave the Enron guys moderation points?
Um, anyone that starts looking into Halliburton nowadays is likely to "suddenly leave town" without telling anyone where they were "going".
couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?
Sure, then Iraq'd have their weapons of mass destruction and everyone would have to listen to them.
Tho I'm kinda wondering if that's the middle east situation you're referring to... there's a lot of them.
I bet this was discovered at the university of elbonia. They know mud.
We went to fight in the middle east to raise OPEC's price per barrel because that raises US Oil (the country, not the company) prices per barrel. The whole situation is created by big oil. So I suppose so. But if we were using hydrogen, it would probably be sold to us by the people who now run big oil, and they'd find someone else to get us pushed into a war with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Quiet you long haired hippy!
Dont you realize how important fossil fuels are!?!
Why we're willing to murder millions of innocent civilians for them in long drawn out wars.
Think solar, wind or fuel cells will ever go anywhere? Keep dreaming.
I have to go skinny dipping through my millions of dollars now.
sincerely,
fat bastard oil tycoon.
You think that's impressive, wait until they figure out how to send mud over the Internet.
Well, well, well. That's a very deep subject. [rimshot-cymbal]
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I'm probably one of the few people who find this interesting since I was working on such devices as a software engineer up to 3 years ago. I think we were doing 1-2bits per second mud pulsing and 7-10bits per second with EMF pulsing (this is in the field). You know... the kind of place where the tools still use 8051's because you can get military grade components and need to operate at 175degC. I wonder what kind of bandwidth they get at what depths.
.5 seconds) but your baseline can change 300psi a second. Anyways, it was a fun project.
Kind of interesting when you are dealing with trying to decode data where you get 10-50psi pulses (maybe lasting around
Brian Macy
I agree. For a news source to have any legitimacy, it has to have lots of money behind it or I won't listen to anything it has to say.
What happens when the link layer is full of worms? or when some one bores a hole in your protocol (drill) stack?
Who is starting the RFC, "TCP/IP over dirt, just add water"?
Billy
Directional and horizontal drilling have been in development for the better part of 20 years. This will be a godsend to them. As it is, the equipment required to transfer control and status data back and forth to the motors is bulky, expensive, and prone to failure.
Most of you don't realize it, but this type of drilling is used all over the place now for all kinds of things. The largest use other than the oil industry is for drilling underneath things (anything, roads, buildings, ship channels, etc) so that cabling, or really damn near anything requiring a hole in the ground can be laid without destruction to the overlying structure. In the early 90's, my dad participated in a project to raise a half-sunken ship from the bottom of a Danish port. They drilled horizontally under the ground beneath the ship, and ran metal cabling underneath it. The cabling was attached to barges on either side of the ship. They pulled apart and raised it off the ocean floor.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
for the people working at the sharp end of the oil business, this is great news. We routinely lower tools on more or less standard (far from it) cables to "log" the entire hole, and more importantly the oil/gas reservoir section. This ability to send broader band data should be able to free up a lot of costly time when we start running imaging tools that give us a detailed image of the rock formation properties, allowing us to produce more oil & gas from a single well - thus allowing all you ex-colonials to run your overheating processors and your gaz guzzlers (me I have 3 pairs of roller blades - how many wheels ??) ;-) :)
Current downhole technology (LWD - logging while drilling - allows us to see directional information, formeation resisitivity - a function of porosity and pore fluid properties - ie oil & gas not conductive - brine conductive, we routinely use Gamma ray radioactivity for correlation purposes - stratigraphy, and when the drillers let us we run nuclear tools that read directly formation density and porosity - of course these numbers are messed up by the thing (hydrocarbons) we are looking for - lots of computers required to sort out the nuances. Newer technology is allowing us to see Array sonic (like seismic data), CMR technology - a great way to see fluid properties. With all this band width we would be able to evaluate a hole sooner, better (less drilling fluid invasion into the reservoir), and improve reservoir and field development starting from the exploration wells, something that many companies are trying to do right now, as expenses for drilling in hostile environments can be huge - just go and hire a deepwater semi-submersible drilling rig for a month or two, then add all the other essential services for finding and producing the black stuff. As time goes on, it just gets more expensive and more challenging to find - and also a lot more interesting, thats why I love my job! - well mostly
Couple of points -
It's not real mud. It's bentonite, aka drilling mud. Keeps the hole open and lubes the tool.
This has _real_ applications for laying fiber / powerlines, etc. Currently, when someone wants to put fiber under a road, they have two options:
1) dig it up. Not real popualar with the people who live there.
2) directional drill. Basically a baby oil directional drill. The key is 'directional,' in that it can change directions. The operator on these things is guided by instinct and a soil profile (educated guess - first five feet are brown dirt, then some rocks, and maybe some black dirt.) If he can _know_ what the tool is doing, he can drill faster. Directional drilling is a must for retrofiting urban areas for fiber, and costs about two orders of magnitude higher than trenching, on a per mile basis.
So, what does this mean for you, the computer guy that could care less about oil drills? Possibly cheaper and more available broadband in urban areas.
I think I need a new sig here.
To quote from the article: Thanx, thebigmacd
The actual measurements would be something like - oh, formation resistivity (maybe 3 measurements), sonic velocity in the rock, natural gamma ray, rock density, porosity, maybe three or four bearing temperatures, a couple of voltages and currents, drillpipe dip and azimuth, vibrational frequency and amplitude, weight on bit... that would be about 20 samples. You would want to measure these at 6-inch intervals, corresponding to 30 seconds' drilling time. This means 40 data points per minute at say two bytes per point equals 80 bytes or 640 bits per minute, which would just about saturate a 10 bit/s data link. The most modern drill technology is steerable, which requires DOWNlink of data from the surface to intelligent tools downhole, as well as additional UPlink telemetry.
With pulse technology, the available bandwidth is so restricted that the engineers have to pick and choose which measurements they really need and which they can forego, or stop drilling to uplink accumulated data (did I mention that deepwater rigs can rent at hundreds of thousands of dollars a day?). With the new high-speed links we'll be able to uplink anything you can build a transducer for.
Hopefully it will help speed up the logging process so it doesn't take him so long. I remember many long stretches of time sitting in a shlumberger truck watching the data from the tool slowly coming back to us. :\
I used to work for the oil industry developing monitoring systems for drill head pumps..
Basically it was so expensive to have a oil platform shut down due to pump failure that it was better to spend a fortune predicting the decay of the pump by analysing changes in behaviour of magnetic fields in the device through monitoring electrical behavious. When the device was approaching the end of it's life they would change it during scheduled pump head withdrawls. (contraception for oil pumps)
So I don't understand why these wires couldn't be used.
No, the Gulf War was fought to keep the prices low. If Saddam had invaded Saudi Arabia, then oil could have hit $100 per barrel. And that means world economic depression, 1930's style not recession. The US and world economy is dependent on foreign oil sources (regardless of the comparative US/Venezuela/Canda import export figures), high oil prices=economic implosion.
Stating that the war was fought to keep prices high is so incredibly obtuse, I can't even begin to figure out where you're coming from with that statement unless its a paranoid deduction that Bush made money on oil=Bush must wage war to keep oil prices high.
Oh and alternative energy sources are on their way... for now though keeping oil flowing smoothly seems to be a good thing. Keeps your car going and the power station in Lagos humming.
This from my brother who works on an offshore rig. Ho hummmm. We're already using the MWD .A more expensive Tool is LWD (Log
While Drilling) used in conjunction with MWD and that saves running
Schlumberger Logs after. Although the gazbillion bytes/sec seems
interesting, so far for us an antiquated 56000 bps seems adequate and gets
us where we need to be. We read pulses in the Mud Pump Pressure created by a
tool in the MWD that is sent Bar Code lingo. I'm trying to put my head
around how faster transmission time would benefit us, but no. I am thinking
though that at some deep water drilling, which is generally say 5 times the
cost our operations are, and normally just doing Exploration ahead of guys
like us, getting some real time data while drilling to read Reservoir Data
would be a boon.
Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel.. As the "BugFree(tm)"
series didn't turn out too well, I'm starting a new series called the
"ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another
shining example.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29
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