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IEEE Looks At Kevin Costner's Oil Cleanup Machines
richardkelleher writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look at the machines developed by a company funded by Kevin Costner that are supposed to extract the oil from the Gulf waters. Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?"
I wonder how he sent them the plans...
I bet he put them in an envelope and gave it to the postman.
He wanted to get in on the lucrative go-juice market, obviously.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
He's got webbed feet.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Costner had to do something with the left-over props from that august movie venture, Water World.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
When I was a kid back in the eighties, I always wondered what would happen if Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and those other guys from all those war movies died. Real tough guys, just watching them fight made your face hurt back then. At some point, IMHO, Kevin Costner also reached that level of actorness. Back then I just thought "no more good movies, that's for sure". Kevin Costner just raised the bar. When he dies the world will go under.
Oh yea...to me Chuck Norris was just a bitch-slappin' red haired pussy.
That, that really grinds my gears!
Wow. I don't care if whatever Kevin Costner invested his fortune in amounted to something as hare-brained as a Brewster's Millions investment scam, he did something to try to prevent a dystopian future. Yay, Kevin! Even if the apparent goal of WaterWorld was to bankrupt Sony Pictures, you at least did something. I wonder if guilt motivated his actions at all? Oh well, all good.
Well, I guess if this is the only good to have come out of making 'Water World,' then perhaps the movie isn't all /that/ bad... but it's still mighty close on balance.
Because it doesn't matter at all if it actually works, what matters is that we all felt good about it. P*sigh* The last 20 years of civilization and higher learning in a nutshell.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If you throw enough Linguini at the wall eventually something will stick.
You will never get anything to stick to the wall if you never try.
This is why freaks like RMS end up achieving something and the rest of us "sensible" people just end up as corporate drones.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
' Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?'
Well, he may not have been the only one, but it's obvious that the oil companies weren't; after all, they're only the causes of the problem!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
This is just a sad point in our world as far as leadership and the quest for the almighty (falling) dollar is concerned. Corruption, apathetic business maneuvers, greed and the "things-are-going-good" mentality caused this whole oil spill to happen. FTFA, I think it's funny how the only plug against this whole centrifuge technology to clean up oil is based on what the end-quality of "oil" will come out of them? How about the end- quality of our oceans, sea life, beaches and aquatic mammals? We all know how oil cleanups work: if it looks good on the surface, time to move on. I hate to don my hippy hate today, but I'm ashamed to associated to humans sometimes.
I seem to remember that a ship sank on the set of Waterworld, and they had to pay a tonne of money to clean up the resulting debris and spills. I can see how that lesson would have been a driver for developing a technology to make it cheaper. Scratch that itch!
The problem is of course collecting the material to run through such a machine. If you wanted to clean a bucket of oily water - that's you solution. A spill at sea is different though. You obviously can't run the entire ocean through his machine - so it's a matter of collecting the right "parts" to do so.
This, of course, all comes back to skimming as the primary means to *collect* the oil to run through such a machine. I'm not an expert here - but I believe the oil company ships already have many ways of separating seawater from oil - as this is a part of their normal reclamation process.
So the value of these machines is somewhat limited - I guess the could be used in conjunction with skimmers, or in very isolated poluted "ponds", etc. The problem of course is that it all comes back to the tedious and laborious process of skimming the oily water.
And the Send-the-Enterprise guy will be arriving in 3... 2... 1...
That's actually Google's top result for me on the query send the enterprise! Not bad, not bad at all.
I think you should read the article again. :)
The problem with the centrifuges is not the quality of the oil coming out. It's that they don't deal well with tarballs or dispersants. They need liquid oil so that it can be separated by spinning it.
Since you're spinning it to get the oil to rise to the top, if it doesn't flow (tarball), or doesn't separate (dispersant), the device ain't going to work. That is what the article was saying.
"he worries that much of the oil being picked up now will be too heavily degraded or contaminated
with dispersants to be easily separated."
We just need to tweak the rules of the game a little. A fair price has to be put on this kind of thing, so that oil companies will go broke if they screw up -- then we have to let them go broke instead of declaring them "too big to fail." Also, in this case, there appears to be a culture of negligence, and those responsible for the bad choices they made should be personally held accountable. Unfortunately, this last bit simply enriches lawyers, and I'm not sure what to do about that part. I guess writing really clear laws that have no doubt as to their intent and then letting human beings sort out the nuances rather than trying to describe everything in the law perfectly would probably help.
Currently hooked on AMP
rtfa before you start ranting. the problem is the quality of oil before collection not after. oil gradually mixes with other stuff to form 'mousse' which cannot be collected so easily.
The machines seem to work well enough in tests; enough for BP to lease 32 of them right off the bat.
TFA states that the machines are capable of separating 99% of the oil out of the water under ideal conditions, which would be soon after the oil began mixing with the water. Weeks/Months of time since the spill began, though, the water and oil mix becomes a frothy mousse which is more difficult to separate.
I hope that the machines are still capable of collecting the oil from this mousse, even if at a slower pace than the more freshly mixed oil.
...RTFA a little more carefully? Oil quality = Ease of separation.
The problem is that it's a centerfuge--in order to work the oil and the water need to be as different as possible (pure oil is lighter than water). The longer the oil has been in the water, the more it's degraded--finely mixed with the water and minerals, the heavier is it, the more similar to the water.... the harder it will be to separate. No one's using the oil for anything afterwards.
This is why freaks like RMS end up achieving something and the rest of us "sensible" people just end up as corporate drones.
Now, for the first time in a long time, I don't feel so bad about being a corporate America reject.
I just need to find some great thing to do....
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I hate to be the bearer of bad news.... But oil cleanup and spill prevention has existed outside the US for decades. Thing is that the US offers a "bounty" on contaminated SEAWATER, not on reclaimed oil. So this technology has been of little intrest in the country where it was born. And at the same time, because countries like Norway, Denmark, the UK and many others are so adept at drilling at sea, they ofcourse have all reasearched in spill cleanup and even prevention. For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea. A device which could easily have prevented the BP spill, but wasn't used, because it wasn't a requirement.
Similarly, noone in their right mind would have used chemicals in the case of the BP spill, simply because collecting the oil afloat is much simpler than if you weigh it down where you can't reclaim it, and it affects the eco system much more profoundly.
That said, if the existance of these centrifuges makes the US more practical in their approach to spill clean up and prevention, I'm all for it. And if they can supplement or improove on existing technology I dont really care who funded their development. It could have been Mickey Mouse as long as the technology gets to make a difference, instead of being buried.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Apparently the Dutch offered to send ships that could recover 97% of the oil a couple of months back, but they weren't allowed due to US environmental regulations:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-oil-spill-response-team-standby-us-oil-disaster
I have done work with Allmaritim and trialed and tested their NOFI Oil Spill equipment equipment in New Zealand and this technology is neither new nor invented by Kevin Costner. It is very sophisticated equipment and has been around for a long time. Are we supposed to think that nobody has been working on oil spill tech until Kevin came on the scene and said "hey we should do something about this" we also do work with Slickbar another spill tech company http://www.allmaritim.com/ http://www.slickbar.com/ if you go to their websites you'll find their kit is being used in the gulf, the company Kevin has something to do with, make centrifuges, you've got to collect the oily water first before you can separate it. You take Kevin Costner out of the story and the story is about some kind of cool oil separating centrifuges, not Kevin rushing in to save us from the oil which, we had in the meantime, been twiddling our thumbs and staring at.
There's a reason nobody's invested in this technology-- the numbers are just impossible.
Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?"
I'll bet that he wasn't the only one. A better question would be: would the same small company with the same clean-up technology garner as much congress attention and free press if it had not been headed and funded by a celebrity in the first place.
Personally, I doubt it. As a society, we're still obsessed by celebrities. Companies or non-profits backed by celebrities often have a huge media advantage over competitors that have no celebrity-backing.
Yes but you have to throw something that exists...linguini don't! The name of that kind of italian pasta is actually linguine not linguini, even though people in the USA keep calling them linguini. Go to Italy and ask for linguini, people will look at you in a weird way lol!
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
How in the hell is this comment modded to 5?
I think it's funny how the only plug against this whole centrifuge technology to clean up oil is based on what the end-quality of "oil" will come out of them?
It's not THAT funny. If you're not filtering out "decent quality oil", you might as well not use centrifuges at all and just pump the oil-water mixture into a tanker and ferry it to shore-based facilities. The quality of the oil coming out is an indication of the quality of the centrifuge. That, and the quality of the water coming out.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
> If you throw enough Linguini at the wall eventually something will stick.
> You will never get anything to stick to the wall if you never try.
This only makes sense as an analogy if it's important to stick only 0.0001% of the linguini to the wall. If you're after 90%+ then there's no point in throwing any amount of linguini at the wall, as it'll detract money and resources from the actual problem.
As far as I understand BP failing would bring down the UK equivalent of Social Security.
Well, according to Kevin, BP is screwed.
Thats easy to fix though. Just rm -r *.tar
I think we should have a scoreboard for his machines. Post the operating logs and create a scoreboard. How many barrel of crude oil Costner's company was able to reclaim from the ocean and multiply that by the cost of crude oil. Then compare that to the price tag Costner charged them.
They need a fleet of these machines able to be deployed anywhere in the world and they need to refine the machines or create others to bring the underwater plumes to the surface. The oil companies weren't ready when they should have been.
People are thinking of oil recovery as a "film" on top of the surface of water. But could this technology be used on the bloom clouds of oil near the well head that have not coagulated into various forms of sludge?
You're confusing a spelling mistake with languages having dissimilar vowel sounds. Frankly if you want to see people butchering a language listen to French words carried over into German.
Even if these machines do achieve 99% removal, they're not going to really work. How many of these 2 ton machines are we going to make, in how long a time? 200 gallons a minute is 288000 gallons of oil/water mix a day. Even if the machine were working on the direct streams of oil that are mostly not water already, the broken well was spewing at least 50,000 barrels per day, which is 2.1 million gallons a day. That's 8 machines - possibly enough, if that oil were diverted into a container. But after millions of gallons of dispersants have caused that oil to mix with water at thousands of times the dilution - many thousands of these machines, to be manufactured faster than the oil spreads through ever more water over days, weeks, months. And since a gallon of oil contaminates somewhere from 100,000 to a million gallons of water, these machines would be needed in quantities up to millions. All during that time the oil is destroying life throughout the Gulf.
In other words, these machines aren't any good for protecting the water and its ecosystems (and industries like fishing) from oil. They're good for salvaging oil from water for sale:
The Gulf doesn't need that water pumped back in. There's plenty of water in the Gulf. That's just an excuse to use these machines to clean up the oil recovered in tankers, so BP can sell it for something like $75 a barrel.
The only thing that's ever mattered to BP is maximizing the amount of oil it can get out of that well, in the shortest time, to sell it. Of course that's why they drill wells. But when the well blows up, protecting us from the damage should be job #1 - and #2, and #3. These machines, and the continuing interest in them, shows that for BP job #1 on down is just getting and selling oil.
And Costner will be there to help them. No shame in Costner investing to make a buck. But in pitching it as cleaning the Gulf is really shameless.
--
make install -not war
It's not that noone's ever made machines like this; many have, and the "industry leader" is a company called Prosep from Canada.
Keep in mind that using these machines, as long as they're not absolutely perfect, violates the Clean Water Act, which mandates perfection so strongly that 95% solutions are penalized. The bureaucracy sat around for a couple months basically trying to decide whether to ignore the fact that Costner's machines, while good, violate their rules, more or less, which is why these machines are (as another poster pointed out) used much more outside the US than within it.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Joanna Lumley on Graham Norton:
2010-07-21
BP's secret weapon in the great oil mop-up? Joanna Lumley and a giant straw mattress
1993
FROGMAT USED TO COMBAT HUGE OIL SPILL IN THE SHETLANDS
Moderation is explained in the FAQ
For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea. A device which could easily have prevented the BP spill, but wasn't used, because it wasn't a requirement.
Sure about that? The accident blew through the blowout preventer.
I remember reading about the pressures involved, they're higher than present in most guns...
I'm not sure a separate shutoff device would have functioned itself, otherwise I'd have expected them to have gotten the well shut off a lot quicker - simply drop a valve onto the remains of the header, weld it on however they need to, then shut the valve. Not spend three months designing something that wouldn't look out of place on a rocket.
I don't read AC A human right
.... but can they act?
He plans to take the place that Chuck Norris has in the geek community...
I also understand that the Dutch also have technology to separate oil and water, though all I know about that is that it doesn't meet EPA regs for release water.
Still, even if a device/technique only had a 50% efficiency, as long as it was cheap it'd still be worth it...
IE take a 50/50 oil/water mix. After 'treatment' you store the 75% oil mix and dump the 75% water mix. Or, depending on how cheap/effective it is, you run the stuff through a second pass - store 88% pure oil and release 88% pure water. Sure, it's not very pure, but you're almost doubling the amount of oil you can store.
How to run the device:
Device 1: Input 50/50, release 75% oil/75% water streams
Device 2: Takes 75% water, runs again - 88% water output(back to ocean), 66% water mix goes back to Device 1
Device 3: Takes 75% oil, runs again, 88% oil goes to tank, 66% oil mix goes back to device 1
With the proper piping you'd be able to reconnect it to run the devices piped different ways to handle different percentages of oil/water. Little oil? Run 1-2-3 to concentrate the oil. Lots? Just pipe straight to the tanks, perhaps 1-2-3 to pull out what water you can.
I figure many of these ships spend more time going to shore to drop off contaminated seawater/oil than they do skimming it. These ideas are to allow them to stay out there longer, picking up more oil, on average.
I don't read AC A human right
I read somewhere that the blowout preventer had been damaged, and wasn't functioning correctly. And the operators knew this. You'd think the required action here would be to stop work until the blowout preventer was fixed, but no, apparently they only had a few days of work to go so they continued and hoped for the best (possibly under pressure from BP)
It's called the "Unreasonable Man Paradox"
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Call me cynical, but it would never happen. Instead, oil companies would take a lesson from Hollywood, and make every single oil well its own corporation, so any disaster would be insulated to a single small corporation that goes broke.
The article indicates, yes, this is the ideal application. Fresh oil that has not had time to be mixed into a "mousse" (as they called it), separates the best.
"For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea. A device which could easily have prevented the BP spill, but wasn't used, because it wasn't a requirement."
The shutoff valve wouldn't have helped when the thing BLEW UP, especially as deep as it was. Many things, valve included, have difficulty turning when stuff blows up and cuts off power and/or communication to the controls.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It might even be rational, a priori, to take the risk - how risky is it to try to replace a blowout preventer in situ?
Even if the apparent goal of WaterWorld was to bankrupt Sony Pictures, you at least did something
"Even"? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...not before.
Dumbass is quoting figures from the demonstration model.
The Costners' tech scales. They just build bigger machines for higher sized loads.
So...the dispersants have made it impossible to clean up?
No sig today...
Presumably the tarballs are solid. Can't they just use a mesh to pick them out before they go into the centrifuge?
No sig today...
Um, screen out the tarballs?
Yea, dispersants were a bad idea since the ultimate plan was to get all that lost oil back. Raise your hand if you saw that one coming.
Well actually, almost all receipts go to the studios and first dollar gross participants (James Cameron, Tom Cruise, etc...) for first run theatrical for the first several weeks. Movie theaters make most of their money on concessions, which is why they charge so much for a box of raisins.
Well the problem with tanking it ashore instead in this case is the sheer volume we're dealing with. Tanking this much mostly-seawater-oil-mousse ashore will work much more poorly economically than even using these centrifuges in a suboptimal working environment, or having to find a way to adjust them to work better with sub-optimal source material.
Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?"
I'll bet that he wasn't the only one. A better question would be: would the same small company with the same clean-up technology garner as much congress attention and free press if it had not been headed and funded by a celebrity in the first place.
Personally, I doubt it. As a society, we're still obsessed by celebrities. Companies or non-profits backed by celebrities often have a huge media advantage over competitors that have no celebrity-backing.
apparently Costner has been trying to promote the tech at conferences for a couple decades, no one would take him seriously until the BP incidents. I don't think his celebrity necessarily has anything to do with anything in this case other than his being able to arrange meetings with people.
Many things, valve included, have difficulty turning when stuff blows up and cuts off power and/or communication to the controls.
There have been solutions to those problems for many years. The deep water blowout preventers required for North Sea operations have to automatically shut off unless a positive control signal is continuously applied. I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere. Equipment that will properly do the job already exists, we just need to make it unprofitable to not use it.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Is it possible that in the years since the Exxon Valdez, that Kevin Costner is the only one who has invested money into the technology of oil spill cleanup?
I'm certain the answer to that question is "No". Lot's of money has been invested. Smaller spills are quietly cleaned up. But this one was so big the politicians felt the need to get involved instead of letting the engineers who know what they're doing handle it. Of course, 'involved" mostly meant running around helplessly shouting "someone's going to pay for this".
They already have to a large extent. The government didn't buy it, but if you check out the list of corporate names involved with Deepwater Horizon, you'll see a lot of corporations which are basically just fronts for BP.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Another thought is how much riskier is it to continue working even if the blowout preventer isn't working?
A well isn't like a car - you can't just stop doing work on it. Or perhaps it'd be better to say that perhaps it's riskier to stop working on it just because the preventer is broken.
You order a replacement/repair parts ASAP, of course, but when it comes to industrial equipment, sometimes you can't just 'stop work'.
Heck, if it's that important, have spare parts on hand, even have a redundant system set up.
I don't read AC A human right
Acoustic triggers are, by law, required on all offshore rigs in Norway and several other countries. Norway is, quite simply, the gold standard for sea drilling, and you have no idea what you are talking about.
You need to try new things ofc, plus tests actually show that it works, BP bought 32 of them and they're being deployed, and they could make a big difference.
Definitely misunderestimated Costner here, I figured it was an attempt to float his crazy nephew's hair-brained idea or something..
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The "real" problem with the centrifuges that Costner invested in is that they can't possibly flow enough water to put a dent in the Gulf Oil Spill. The IEEE article's calculation of the centrifuge's capacity assumes they're basically sticking a hose right on top of the oil spill, which is hardly realistic. Even assuming that the majority of the oil spilled is in the first 3 inches of water, a 1 mile by 1 mile area would need to have 50 million gallons filtered. 3 of the centrifuges could process 600,000 gallons per day, and so would take 83 days to complete a 1 mile x 1 mile x 3 inch deep volume of water. With an oil spill covering roughly 8,000 square miles, 700,000 days would be required. So under ideal conditions (all the oil was concentrated in one spot and easy to collect), it would take over 6000 centrifuges to process the "ideal spill" in one year. I think the centrifuges could be quite useful for filtering small, localized areas (protected wetlands, beaches, coves, etc), but the open ocean is just so massive that no device could effectively take care of it. In my opinion, a solution leveraging nature itself would be ideal.
"If you throw enough Linguini at the wall eventually something will stick."
Unfortunately, it'll still be garbage.
"IEEE Spectrum takes a look at the machines developed by a company funded by Kevin Costner that are supposed to extract the oil from the Gulf waters."
Well I wrecked the gate...don't hear me braggin'.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
A fair price has to be put on this kind of thing, so that oil companies will go broke if they screw up
.
http://google.com/search?q=%22+$4300-*-barrel%22
By some estimates, that should work out to over a quarter billion dollars a day.
The problem comes when the Coast Guard and FBI are in collusion with the corp in an effort to hide from the press exactly how much is being spewed into the ecosystem.
gewg_
Studios can only make so many blockbusters at a time, and they'd prefer to invest in the ones that pay off *well*. A movie can make a profit and still be considered a failure if their goals are set high.
The idealistic notion you describe in the first part is exactly how laws started out. We ended up with the situation you describe in the second part because idealistic notions rarely, if ever, work in the real world.
Given that 99.999% of the oil spilled annually is best recovered by that method, it's pretty much unsurprising that's the method that has been concentrated on.
You stop drilling and figure out a way to attach a failsafe to this thing. Maybe you can't replace the BOP itself, but don't try to tell me that you can't rig a mechanism to it that will prevent an oil leak should the BOP fail.
Doesn't matter if it's going to delay work for three months and cost a billion dollars. If it's too expensive to drill safely then you shouldn't be drilling at all.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
"Equipment that will properly do the job already exists, we just need to make it unprofitable to not use it."
It is NEVER profitable to do something safely. Safety requires extra equipment, review, supervision, strict adherence to policies, etc. That's the definition of safety. These things have and will always cost money.
The only thing you can do to make this "unprofitable" is to require amazingly huge fines for any problems that arise. Of course, then you have to deal with the issue of getting a multinational multi-billion dollar company to actually pay the fine.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
The whole thing is being treated as a PR exercise rather than a cleanup so this sort of thing is to be expected.
Cleanup ships were available, booms were available, the problem should have been attacked with logistics and engineering. Instead we mostly got a lot of bickering over how many barrels a day were leaking out (was 2000, then 5000, now 50000...and still rising) and doing everything possible to stop people making estimates by banning photography and dumping as many dispersants as possible into the mix before it could surface. CYA at its finest.
Dispersants don't make the oil disappear and are quite toxic in themselves so none of that solved anything, it just delayed it. We'll mostl likely be reading stories about new globs of pollution appearing in the gulf for decades to come.
No sig today...
There will never ever be a perpetual motion machine.
It's not enough that something is "an idea", it also has be within reason (and known physics!).
HAND.
Typically you guard against this by instituting a capitalization requirement, ensuring that companies involved in drilling have the money and/or the insurance necessary to pay likely claims in case of an accident. This is, in fact, practiced in the oil industry. As far as BP is concerned, it passes this test with flying colors. It has been and will be substantially hurt by the spill (its stock price has lost half its value and it's had to suspend dividend payments -- that's an indication of the magnitude, although I think the market has overreacted, I don't think BP's lost nearly half its value over this incident).
Hmmmmm? I would think that progress happens when the reasonable man finds better ways of adapting himself to the world. I suppose you could look at it either way though. Again, a witty phrase proves nothing,
May the Maths Be with you!
They can when those tarballs are on the sand. Check out the machines from Beach-tech. These machines use mesh to 'sift', and do not 'rake'. Raking breaks up the tarballs undesirably.
An interesting factoid is these machines work much better at night in the dark, because the colder temperature coagulates the tarballs better for easier removal.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
I heard it's a good lubricant, even if it's a little wet.
And that damn sentence is too long for slashdot's sigs system !
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
... Also, in this case, there appears to be a culture of negligence ...
There has certainly been a lot of noise in that area, but mostly made by the sub-contractors, who just may have an ulterior motive for throwing up such a smoke screen!
It's a shame there aren't smaller versions of this skimmer device that could be bolted to the deck of all the local fishing/shrimping vessels so they could go fill their holds with oil and get paid (by BP of course) to be out there cleaning it up, plus the full cost of cleaning their vessels of oil contamination once they stop skimming for oil and go back to fishing/shrimping.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
No I'm not. I'm italian (not italian american) and I know both languages pretty well. I live in Italy. The spelling mistake would have been the correct thing if the final "e" in linguine had to be pronounced as the english "e" in "adobe", instead it has to be pronounced like the "e" in "red", hence linguine is the way it's written in italian and linguini is wrong in any case.
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
The devices that are mandatory in most of europe (funnily the home of BP being one of the exceptions, presumably because of the much more shallow waters they're drilling in there), are a little bit more than just the blowout preventer, it's a device which can be triggered in case of emergencies where the wireguided signals from the rig is unable to reach the BOP. They were, as best I can tell, developed after a problem with a platform sinking, same as what happened in the gulf.
Not being an engineer, I'm really at a loss to explain the difference between the BOP installed at BPs site and the ones that are generally being required by most other offshore oil producing countries. But from what the engineers explained to me, these remote controlled shutoff valves would have been able to stop the spill once the pipe had burst, assuming the blowout preventer ofcourse worked (which some people have questioned, since the installed "dead-mans-switch" didn't activate it).
From what I understand, it may have been that such valves were not installed because of the expense of installing them when drilling at these depths, and a furhter combination of BP not being required to use them, and also questioning of their effectiveness at these depths.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html has some of the best graphics detailing the idea of the remote controlled switch. Again, the assumption being that the BOP is actually functioning. And from what I can understand, replacing or repairing a defective BOP IS possible.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is all to do with the dissatisfied man. Most people just go with the flow. That has always been the case, and always will be, because for a society to flourish there needs to be a core of stability and natural selection will ensure that the average person will just carry on regardless of the political system - despite their moaning.
A minority will be so upset and so compelled, that they do something about the system they hate so much. They are the people who change things. Helps if you are wealthy too.
There is also a small minority who are happy with the system and they will fight to keep it the way it is.
And there, you have the basis of all political systems and all political conflicts. Most people are drones.
You would not use 100,000 machines... if one machine can do 200 gpm, and the technology works, then you scale it up and make one ten times as big that can do 20,000 GPM for only 10 times the cost.
This is the advantage of scaling... so long as the technology scales, you get n^2 return for n investment.
Typical art student "reasoning". It sounds reasonable but uses an unreasonable definition of reason.
A reasonable man applies reason to everything. All the greats in science and engineering applied reason to achieve what they did.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
That is it! Throw Linguini at the oil spill! You, my friend, are a frikkin' genius!
Actually, I would argue that Waterworld was a philanthropic effort too. Anything that hurts Sony is probably a good thing for humanity.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's the same kind of misguided logic that makes people buy lottery tickets. Every day, millions of "visionary" inventors/pioneers/dreamers squander their time and savings on awful or/or unworkable ideas and dreams that fail miserably. But every blue moon one of them comes up with a good idea and succeeds. But no one does a news report on the millions who failed. Only the successes get publicized. This lionizes the inventor/pioneer/dreamer and creates the illusion that it's easier to succeed at such an endeavor than it actually is.
For the vast majority of people, it's quite sensible to avoid being a wild-eyed dreamer. The more outlandish your dreams, the more likely it is that pursuing them would be the equivalent of blowing your money on lottery tickets. The more realistic your dreams (i.e., the less wild-eyed), the more likely others will be willing to join your work and invest in them, making it unnecessary to blow all your money and time in the first place.
Telling people to "follow their dreams" is all well and good if their dreams aren't stupid. But the vast majority of dreams *are* stupid. Go to any high school in America and ask kids what they really dream about, and most of them will probably (if they're really being honest) answer something along the lines of "rap star," "rock star," "movie star," "sports star," etc. These kids would be much better off being "corporate drones" (as you so derisively put it) than wasting their lives trying to pursue those dreams, but people like you would have them go for it (to quote an old lottery advertising standard: "You can't win if you don't play!"). Thank god most people are sensible enough to be "corporate drones" or NOTHING would ever get done in this world.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You're the same guy who got into the Wikipedia edit war over the pronunciation of Steve Buscemi's name, aren't you?
Typically you guard against this by instituting a capitalization requirement, ensuring that companies involved in drilling have the money and/or the insurance necessary to pay likely claims in case of an accident. This is, in fact, practiced in the oil industry. As far as BP is concerned, it passes this test with flying colors.
Fat lot of good it did us. If anything, this disaster proves that "you break it, you bought it" is not a sufficient regulatory requirement.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He took care of it:
http://imgur.com/h4dgh.jpg
Yes but you have to throw something that exists...linguini don't!
The name of that kind of italian pasta is actually linguine not linguini,
even though people in the USA keep calling them linguini.
Go to Italy and ask for linguini, people will look at you in a weird way lol!
I think you've missed the point.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The only way would be reversing it so american people would read linguine as linguini but then they'd start writing it the wrong way: linguini instead of linguine.
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
Maybe Kevin is the reason why people refrain from investing in spill cleanup. Not so much an ideological but more a personal thing here. Imagine being stuck in an elevator with Kevin at your side.
I apologise for being myself; a fscking bastard.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
It is too bad that companies are the one who control the world. And smaller companies, even big international corporations are controlled by bigger ones or very small group of people (whole world can be in the hands from few dozens to few hundreds). They are the mens behind curtains who no one knows and who controls the media and what laws gets passed. Sounds very very very conspiracy theory but it would be foolish not even think it would be possible or it would not be executed in some manner.
Corporation CEO's should always be responsible what is happening in the company. And companies should be always responsible for the society where they are working. If the company cheats or brakes the law, they should be warned and billed first time (if crime is small), second time the company is simply taken a part. Government should not come to rescue any company what wants that markets are not controlled by government but there would be total capitalism. The idea in the capitalism was that the companies rises and they fall soon. That there would never be big international companies what controls others and slow downs the development or competition.
It is just funny how capitalism needs that almost every 15-20 years there comes big troubles like this last 2008-2009 happening. And the game table is reset by the government by using socialism key ideas. Too bad that peoples money is spended to big companies to pay for those share holders who toke "a risk" in the first place to actually having change to loose all their money if the invest did not work.
What risk is to invest money to big corporations when the government pays share holders invest and bonuses when the risk comes true? Only because those shareholders or companies are just too big "to be lost". Truth is that there is always somekind blackmail behind the actions to pay off the money for shareholders so they would not pull the money from other important companies or deals. Even governments are slaves for shareholders, while government should be servent for the people.
The only way would be reversing it so american people would read linguine as linguini but then they'd start writing it the wrong way: linguini instead of linguine.
You're confusing correctness with convention.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
When I first heard about this I had flashbacks of Chernobyl. Basically, they'd shut it down to some extent to pressure test the cement job (as happens every time), then the bad things happened, then by the time the manual shutoff was called for it wasn't working (reason still unknown.)
An acoustic trigger may have worked, or may not have worked. (Can't say for certain without knowing why the BOP didn't work.)
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I'm not, there are a lot of wrong conventions especially with italian words used abroad, that doesn't make them more correct at all, it just makes the amount of ignorant people bigger. This is not valid only for italian words of course but convention doesn't make something correct and it sucks when convention makes its way in written words and not just in slang.
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
Apparently you did not RTFA. They clearly state the origins and inventor of this device. (Hint: It's not Costner!)
George Bernard Shaw is not an authority on reason. This quote from him is a glib platitude.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The same question also occurred to me as I read the article.
I also read the article thinking "Yet Another Hydrocyclone!" Which is a very well established technology for cleaning up produced water from an oil well. So, there's kudos to this Costner guy for spotting an alternative use for a well-established technology, and then sustaining investment for an unfashionably long period. He's gone up in my estimate of his IQ from actor-normal (mildly retarded) to quite possibly population-average or above.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
No. The use of dispersants has, maybe, made it harder to clean up.
It was probably impossible to clean up to a pre-spill state about 3 femtoseconds after the blowout started, but the use of dispersants may have made it harder to approach "pristine".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Your volumetric estimates are not incorrect, just inappropriate.
I read the article and envisaged this sort of machinery as being used to process the mix of oil and seawater collected by the various skimming options, so that the centrifuge discharges wet oily sludge (to be taken to shore for processing/ disposal) and large quantities of seawater which is much less contaminated with oil. Since the oil industry is already full of equipment for taking slightly oily water and cleaning it better (the UK requirement is to less than 50ppm / 0.005% v/v oil in water) prior to discharge over the side, then this is equipment possibly suitable for "front-ending" a spread of off-the-shelf hydrocyclones to process the spill debris.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
... at which point, they'll stop being oil companies (by stopping exploration, drilling, production, processing and transportation) and try to recycle themselves into a less hazardous business instead.
And what are you going to run your SUV on after that?
I noticed a decade or so ago that Shell were studiously manoeuvring themselves away from being an "oil company" and into being an "energy comapny". Now, most of that was greenwash I'm sure, but despite working for Shell on many occasions, I've never confused them with being either idiots or cowboys.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Citation please. To the actual legislation, not some random blog, or an article written by a journalist who is underqualified to lick stamps in a Citizens Advice Bureau.
(Bear in mind that I'm writing this on an oil rig in the North Sea, working in a business that I've worked in for over 20 years. So I do know what the laws around here are. Personally, I suspect that you're thinking of SSSVs, which are as closely related to remote operation of BOPs as an Akkadian goatskin raft is to a flight suit with integral life jacket. But you know what you're thinking of better than I do.)
And that's enough dealing with Gulf silliness for today. Thank fuck I don't work for BP and have to put up with this stuff (well-intentioned though much of it is) for a living. Or for Andanarko or whatever the 25% wholly-US-owned partner in the offending well was called.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The only thing you can do to make this "unprofitable" is to require amazingly huge fines for any problems that arise. Of course, then you have to deal with the issue of getting a multinational multi-billion dollar company to actually pay the fine.
No problem, deny their drilling license if they don't have the proper equipment in their drilling plan. Revoke it if they are found to not be in compliance (perform random inspections). These problems have already been addressed in the North Sea, the US simply hasn't had the will to implement the same measures.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
I'm not, there are a lot of wrong conventions especially with italian words used abroad, that doesn't make them more correct at all, it just makes the amount of ignorant people bigger.
This is not valid only for italian words of course but convention doesn't make something correct and it sucks when convention makes its way in written words and not just in slang.
If one person says the Earth is spherical and a million say the Earth is flat, it is conventional to say the Earth is flat. It's not a matter of fact and when you get into language it's even more inappropriate to argue such nonsense.
It doesn't fucking matter what the Italians or anyone says. When a large group of people accept one thing as truth it really doesn't matter what an individual in that population or an entirely different group thinks.
So give it up.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Whatever, I remain of my idea especially because in the original language no one will ever say linguini. So I don't even consider it a convention, just an "american convention".
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
Case in point....
The girl my son is dating claims to want to be a lawyer and a wedding planner. BTW, she idolizes the Kardashians.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"There have been solutions to those problems for many years. The deep water blowout preventers required for North Sea operations have to automatically shut off unless a positive control signal is continuously applied. I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere. Equipment that will properly do the job already exists, we just need to make it unprofitable to not use it."
BP says the Deepwater Horizon did have a "dead man" switch, which should have automatically closed the valve on the seabed in the event of a loss of power or communication from the rig. BP said it can't explain why it didn't shut off the well.
Whatever, I remain of my idea especially because in the original language no one will ever say linguini.
So I don't even consider it a convention, just an "american convention".
In the realm of Americans then an "American Convention" is just a "Convention"
Just let it go. You interjected trying to sound all informative but it's no different than playing grammar Nazi. We're not "the uninformed masses", we've just derived a different spelling that is no less "correct".
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
How is a problem separating the heavy stuff and excuse to block the skimmers from separating the light stuff?
Is the Gulf of Mexico so small that 50 or so skimmers would block any other solution?
I thought the main point of the article was that the administration and BP have drug their feet for so long while dumping toxic dispersents in the water that the centrifuges won't work as well now.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I also read the article thinking "Yet Another Hydrocyclone!" Which is a very well established technology for cleaning up produced water from an oil well.
Well, it will work well unless BP keeps dumping those dispersents into the mix.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Kudo's Joce640k.
This oil spill has been used political pawn to push a cap-and-trade agenda.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I'm gonna let it go because I'm not a troll as someone marked me in this thread. I just want to let people know how things are. Because especially about Italy and italian culture there's a lot of disinformation, mostly spread by ignorance and by italian-american people. It will sound weird to you to know there's no such thing as veil piccata or marinara sauce or chicken parmigiana, in Italy simply because they're not italian things, just american invention that someone decided that people should believe they're truly italian recipes when here in Italy don't exist at all. Moreover Panini is the plural of panino and that pistachio is actually correctly written pistacchio and the right way to write straciatella is stracciatella...I could go on for ages. The only true thing said abroad about Italy is that our prime minster is a dickhead and I'm happy that abroad this is well known, I'm just sad that in Italy there are people that don't realize it. But I'd better end it and sorry if I disturbed you, I know all this developed in an extreme OT.
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
But:
* they are talking about 50 machines, not 3
* the oil is not spread out over the entire Gulf, and most of the oil WILL be in that first three inches of water. They won't have to process the entire volume of the Gulf.
* if left to its own course, most of the oil will flow to the surface in a small area. If these sort of measures were put into service right after the blowout, 90% of the oil would have been picked up and reprocessed.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
George Bernard Shaw was a radical communist/marxist philosopher. He also believed that if someone doesn't contribute more to the world than they consume, that they should be exterminated, as they don't benefit greater society.
This bastardization of Italian culture is not unique at all to Italian culture... "Chinese food" is actually 7 different cuisines from one country plus Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Burma, Thailand, India, Malaysia and many more and even those countries have for centuries borrowed from each other, but we still call it "Chinese". After that we inject some America fads like fortune cookies and I think disposable bamboo chops sticks were an American idea.
"Mexican food" arguably has it even worse, a perverse combination of South and Central American foods mixed in with European expectations, Spanish rule and Catholicism. Now it's lumped together with a narrow spectrum of ingredients and spices and all called "Mexican".
I'm not trying to attack you personally, the point is it's just "The American Way" to assimilate other things and throw blankets on them to simplify it.
I do agree with your general argument, but the little things like how a shape of noodles is spelled won't win any wars. Americans don't care or are too shallow to realize that they're mocking an entire civilization when they try aspire to "authenticity" of... fucking food!
So, please continue your quest to protect your origins. Just don't waste too much time with the details (pistachio and pistacchio), especially with Americans. Hell, my browser puts red squigglies under pistacchio! I'd readily expect my mindless peers right-click autocorrect.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
I'm happy we found finally the right way to conclude this and u made a point, thing that wasn't coming out earlier. Ok about the use of doubles (like pistacchio), but about some dishes that are totally non existent I'll keep fighting...at least when they pretend they're italian! When I was in NJ a group of italian-american girl nearly wanted to start a fight just cuz I said that chicken parmigiana is not italian and if u go to italy they don't cook nor sell it. Lol! Cheers man!
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
You take Kevin Costner out of the story and the story is about some kind of cool oil separating centrifuges, not Kevin rushing in to save us from the oil which, we had in the meantime, been twiddling our thumbs and staring at.
Well, to be fair, the pipe has been pouring oil out for 3 months.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
You stop drilling and figure out a way to attach a failsafe to this thing. Maybe you can't replace the BOP itself, but don't try to tell me that you can't rig a mechanism to it that will prevent an oil leak should the BOP fail.
The GP mentioned 'stop working', which is different than 'stop drilling'. There's many phases to drilling an oil well - one of which is replacing the drilling mud that was inserted while drilling with cement in such a way as to create a liner.
As sleazyridr mentioned, they weren't actively drilling at the time of the explosion. Indeed, they were in the process of shutting the well down to replace the mobile drilling platform with a permanent well platform.
I don't read AC A human right
You need to read the GP again:
* the oil is not spread out over the entire Gulf, and most of the oil WILL be in that first three inches of water. They won't have to process the entire volume of the Gulf.
He didn't say they did, those figures were for the 8,000 square miles covering the spill - i.e. the square mile area covered in oil. The total volume of the Gulf is many orders of magnitude higher.
* they are talking about 50 machines, not 3
Extrapolating from the GP's calculations (which others have verified), 50 centrifuges would take about 110 years to clean the Gulf spill. That's why the GP said it would take 6,000 of them to clean it up in one year - because that's what it would take.
* if left to its own course, most of the oil will flow to the surface in a small area. If these sort of measures were put into service right after the blowout, 90% of the oil would have been picked up and reprocessed.
You obviously know nothing about the physical properties of oil.
Just for fun, go out to your driveway and spray the pavement with water. Get it nice and wet, if you can get it into a puddle even better. Next, pour about a tablespoon of oil on the pavement (you can use cooking oil if you want, but if you have diesel fuel it will more closely resemble the oil that is in the Gulf).
Watch what happens. One thing that definitely does not happen is it does not sit in nice, tight little pools - it spreads way the hell out. That's because the oil is less dense than the water, but water is also slippery. This means there is nothing for the oil to push against to hold its shape. On a table top or something, oil will sort of pool up because the surface of the oil meets with a lot more friction when it's up against the table top.
There are pictures of the gulf from space a few months before the spill that show oil sheens from natural seeps that are hundreds of miles long and a few miles wide. Without the dispersants, the sheens from the spill would be many, many, many times larger than that. You would more than likely have a much bigger cleanup problem on your hands without them. That's why they are required to use dispersants in the first place.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Huh?
BP is on the hook because they own the lease on the reservoir. The way the law is written, it doesn't matter who is producing (the lease owners often contract that out), the lessee is the one responsible if anything goes wrong.
I'm sorry, but TransOcean and Haliburton are well known in the oil industry for what they do - they are not fronts for BP.
The government didn't "not buy" anything - there was no reason to even attempt to fool the government because it is very clear who is responsible and it isn't the company operating the rig. The reason BP (and most oil companies) contract these things out is because it is usually cheaper to hire a specialist company than to maintain your own rig department, pure and simple.
In this case, it certainly wasn't. Poor practices from TransOcean and Haliburton, combined with poor QA at BP and corruption to the MMS means BP is going to have to pay about $25 billion plus whatever the $1000 per barrel fine works out to (should be around $4 billion, using current total estimates). I don't care who you are, that's going to have a huge negative impact on your company.
Right now, oil companies that operate in the US are saying "Oh shit..."
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Acoustic triggers are, by law, required on all offshore rigs in Norway and several other countries. Norway is, quite simply, the gold standard for sea drilling, and you have no idea what you are talking about.
Great, fine, dandy. My point would be that an acoustic trigger would be secondary to the lack of a functioning shutoff. An acoustic trigger is there merely as yet another backup to close a valve. A valve that, at Deepwater Horizon, didn't work. Whether due to being bad before the accident or damaged by it, it didn't work, and still doesn't.
If there was a shutuff still intact even without an acoustic trigger, we'd have had a robot down there to manually shut the well off within a week, not three months later with a fancy cap.
As twisteddk and bigzigga mentioned, there were actually 2 controls that failed, and when they DID send a robot down('Hotstab'), it failed. The BOP was the primary safety device, and it failed utterly.
As such, the balance of evidence is that the 'acoustic trigger' wouldn't have done anything in this case.
Given what happened, I'm more for redundent shutoff valves, two BOPs, something. Still not sure the second shutoff valve would have worked; don't know enough about why the primary BOP failed. Don't even know if there were other cutoffs. Do know that the rig sinking/crashing onto the site is part of the problem, to what extent, I don't know.
I don't read AC A human right
Just reading, noted that the BOP for deepwater HAD a 'deadman switch', just not the acoustic shutoff.
It was noted that they tried to use a robot to activate the BOP manually, and that failed as well.
If nothing else, this accident points out that a failure can cost you BILLIONS, which will pay for a lot of safety measures elsewhere.
I don't read AC A human right
I work as an engineer in the oil field, and I'm amazed that the US hasn't already adopted many of the regulations already in place elsewhere.
They have. The BOP in the BP spill had all the features you and others describe, as well as being highly redundant internally. It was a fail-safe device.
What do you do when the fail-safe fails?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
And you don't think the minute it started BP didn't arrange to have all this equipment to clean it up deployed, you know they did because if they hadn't it would be all over the news, instead the news focused on the fact that they hadn't plugged the leak, nobody was saying and they aren't cleaning it up.
His celebrity no doubt helped a lot - someone says "Jack Puderschmidt has a machine that could clean up the spill" and your response is "Yeah, him and everybody else. Who the hell is Jack Puderschmidt?" That doesn't mean his machine won't ever come up and be evaluated, and if it works eventually used, but it does mean he's just another guy in line, waiting for everyone ahead of him to have their chance at it first.
Now, you hear "Kevin Costner has a machine that could clean up the spill" and your response is "Kevin Costner? Really? I'll bet it doesn't work. Lets get him up here and find out." He gets to jump ahead of the line because people know who he is.
For what it's worth, Costner's machine doesn't work at all on the kind of oil that comprises most of the spill (it's heavy and sticky, which clogs the machine). That's why they only got whatever it was, 30 or 50 of them - they'll be able to use it on the very light stuff or perhaps as a second phase of another process in some cases. If it were good enough to clean the whole spill they would have gotten more like a couple thousand, because that is what it would take for the centrifuge to clean up the spill in a reasonable amount of time.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The Costners' tech scales.
No, it doesn't.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
This is exactly the what the insurance companies do. When they choose to insure a high-risk group, the insurers create a 'Satellite' company to isolate liability. If the gamble (insurance is legalized gambling) fails, only the satellite is impacted. Sleazy, but effective.
Every endeavor is a pyramid: a few very successful people at the top, a bunch that make a decent living from it in the middle, and a bunch of pretenders at the bottom. ("I'm actually an actor," says the waiter.)
You can talk about talent and education and skill and so on, and those are important attributes. But the pure "drive" to succeed counts for a lot, and it's drive (coupled with the right set of tools) that can make you a success. It's drive that keeps you going when everyone else tells you that you should be a good little corporate drone.
You don't have to be a "star" to make a living doing what you love. Plenty of musicians, for example. You do, however, have to work your ass off.
Honesty counts too. Are you good enough? Can you be good enough? What does it take to be competitive in that arena?
Finally, you talk about "getting things done". There are two sides to that equation. Some people, who you may consider to be "drones", actually like business, or law, or medicine, or mechanics, or gardening, or cooking, or whatever. Those were their dreams, and they're living it.
Other people are stuck there, or never had a dream, or a passion, or a purpose. Never took a risk. Who listened to bitter people like you, who told them that the odds were against them, so why bother.
Do you really think they're happy? Do you really think that they WANT to be "sensible", and work as a greeter at Walmart the rest of their lives?
You only have one life. One. This is it. No replays. No resets. No do overs.
Or to borrow from Richard Bach, "Are you doing right now what you really want to do more than anything else in the world? If your answer is no, stop doing it, and hurl yourself into want you want most to do."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"It doesn't fucking matter what the Italians or anyone says. When a large group of people accept one thing as truth it really doesn't matter what an individual in that population or an entirely different group thinks."
Tell that to Galileo. At one point in time, a large group of people thought the world was flat. One individual thought differently, and said so.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Tell that to Galileo. At one point in time, a large group of people thought the world was flat. One individual thought differently, and said so.
The only thing worse than a bad joke is someone explaining that bad joke.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
In English it is pronounced like adobe and the spellings (both being accepted) reflect that. You can call it "wrong" but that's fairly ignorant of the natural fate of many words that cross into other languages.
No I'm not. Didn't even know about that.
Bye -Gabriele- http://flickr.com/photos/gabriele83
I agree. We need to be better at preventing this sort of thing. But it has done us some good. BP's financial strength has meant that instead of going bankrupt and leaving the government with the whole cleanup bill it's actually covering some of the costs. It probably won't cover them all. But it will do better than a smaller company would have done.